America Keeps Telling the Media That News Coverage Needs to Change
Despite an increasing number of lawsuits and many unflattering polls, the press evidently sees no need for reform
In his opening statement in the CNN defamation trial, attorney Kyle Roche encouraged a Florida jury to “send a message to the mainstream media” by awarding damages to his client, Zachary Young. Young, a private security contractor who helped exfiltrate refugees from Afghanistan, was suing the network for a piece that had run on air and online that portrayed Young as bilking desperate Afghans for exorbitant extraction fees and had used the term “black market” to describe Young’s enterprise. Young says the story, which first aired in November 2021 in the wake of America’s embarrassing withdrawal from Afghanistan, falsely depicted his actions and destroyed his business and reputation.
“You’re going to have an opportunity to do something significant in this trial,” Roche exhorted jurors. “You’re going to have an opportunity to change an industry,” adding that “[CNN] didn’t care about the truth. They cared about theater, and they cared about ratings.”
Roche contrasted the reporting approaches of journalistic icons like Walter Cronkite, whom Roche said “actually cared about delivering the facts” with those of modern news outlets, which are preoccupied with “clicks, scandal and drama,” Roche told the jury. “You have the opportunity in this trial to move the pendulum back towards sanity in our media.”
On Friday, the jury rendered its verdict, siding with Young and awarding him $5 million in compensatory damages. It also found CNN liable to pay additional punitive damages to Young. Rather than proceeding to another drawn-out trial where jurors would have determined the amount of the network’s punitive liability, CNN quickly settled, paying Young a confidential figure, likely millions more.
But, will this decision really move the needle? It may “send a message to the mainstream media,” but unless the world witnesses the media loudly and clearly receiving it, how much impact will the message actually have on journalistic practice?
As the trial was nearing completion last week, various media voices fretted over the possibility of the case going against CNN, along with the fact that the courts had even allowed it to go to trial. “At a moment of wider vilification and disparagement of the press, there is every reason to believe this will be weaponized, even if CNN prevails,” University of Utah law school professor RonNell Andersen Jones told David Bauder of the Associated Press in the days before the decision.
“I always dread any kind of libel cases because the likelihood that something bad will come out of it is very high,” Jane Kirtley, director of the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and the Law at the University of Minnesota, lamented to Bauder. “This is not a great time to be a libel defendant if you’re in the news media. If we ever did have the support of the public, it has seriously eroded over the past few years…. Everybody in the news media is on trial in this case.”
Yet, after the trial reached its conclusion, those news outlets that did bother to cover it did so matter-of-factly, wrapping up the story by simply reporting the verdict, the outcome, perfunctory reactions from each side and not much else. CNN said it was “proud of our journalists and are 100% committed to strong, fearless and fair-minded reporting at CNN, though we will of course take what useful lessons we can from this case.”
But, that freedom-of-the-press-is hanging-in-the-balance narrative? Suddenly disappeared.
The episode was a repeat of last month’s resolution of a defamation suit that Donald Trump had brought against ABC. Prior to ABC’s decision to settle with the incoming president for $15 million, reporters portrayed Trump’s filing of the suit as an existential threat to the First Amendment. However, afterwards, the press simply moved on and continued its business as usual.
So it’s questionable what “useful lessons” CNN and the rest of the mainstream media will take away from the loss of this case. Because, for the press, ignoring glaring warnings that it needs to course-correct is business as usual.
In 2021, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism Report found that just 29% of Americans generally trust the news media, the lowest level reported among the 46 countries that were in the study. In the 2024 report, the U.S. trust level was practically unchanged at 32%. Meanwhile, the 2024 edition of Gallup’s annual Trust in Mass Media yielded similar results, as only 31% of Americans said they have at least “a fair amount” of confidence in the media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly.”
Unsurprisingly, journalists deem themselves much more trustworthy than the public does. According to a 2022 Pew Research Center study, 65% of reporters believe news outlets do a “very/somewhat good job” of “reporting the news accurately.” Only 35% of Americans agree.
Other studies show a more disturbing portrait of how Americans view the media. In 2020, a study from The Knight Foundation found that 83% of Americans think that the press deserves either “a great deal” or “a moderate amount” of blame for U.S. political polarization.
The results of a 2022 New York Times/Siena College survey are even more troubling, as 71% of registered voters said that democracy is currently in peril, and 84% identified “the mainstream media” as one of the forces endangering democracy, with 59% considering it a “major threat.” The media was the only one of 10 surveyed items that more than 50% of respondents considered to be a major threat; the next highest was “Donald Trump” at 45%.
Taken in conjunction, these findings should have been viewed as the equivalent of a journalistic code red. The editors of major U.S. news outlets should have held conference calls to discuss how they, as news leaders, should jointly recalibrate their coverage. Emergency conferences of journalism school department chairs should have been held to discuss immediate, nationwide implementation of revisions to curriculum and instruction. Newspaper publishers around the country should have conducted comprehensive reviews of their operations to respond to the criticisms that Americans keep communicating in these polls.
Instead, most mainstream outlets brushed off the findings or reported them summarily. Then they went right back to business as usual.
It may take more losses in court for them to get the message.
Portions of this post have been adapted from my book The Anti-Partisan Manifesto: How Parties and Partisanism Divide America and How to Shut Them Down. Buy the book here. For the time being, it is only available digitally. To read, download the Kindle app to your phone, your iPad or tablet, your Kindle device or your computer.
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