They All Lie

How JMM's accountant represents the bulk of America's view on the media

(From the Journalism Monday Memo, my weekly Substack about media, tech, and the ever-shrinking space between them.)

Your accountant should always be a Republican. That was the advice JMM’s dad gave him when looking for a guy who could handle the complex taxes of a freelancer. And Accountant definitely fits the bill. A former farmer turned tax guru, Accountant is a hard R Republican, forged during the farm crisis of the Reagan years. He believes in honest work, small government, and maximizing JMM’s refund. And he has no qualms about sharing his opinion about anything.

On the election: “I blame the Democrats for Trump. They put up an awful candidate.”

On Gen Z: “They don’t know how to work.”

And on the media: “NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, Fox—they all lie, every one of them.”

On that last one, Accountant is far from alone. Gallup just revisited some of its findings from last year’s poll on trust in media, drilling deep into the data to glean some insights on the future. It’s not pretty. Unsurprising, trust is media is on a downward slide. Over a third of the country (36%) is in Accountant’s camp, saying they have no confidence at all in America’s mass media, up from a low of 4% in 1975. And if you break it down by political affiliation, almost two-thirds of Republicans (59%) agree with Accountant’s take.

That’s not shocking—but not just for the reason you think. While Pres. Donald Trump has done plenty of damage to the media, from chirping constantly about fake news to recently promoting the internet’s worst propagandists to the White House press poll, there are plenty of other reasons for the crumbling of trust between the media and the audience it is supposed to serve. False narratives have flooded social media. AI slop is everywhere. And plenty of so-called news influencers will say anything to get a click. And like some of the falsehoods themselves, all that ill will makes its way from the fringes to more legitimate media. A 2017 study from Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism summarizes what consumers think of the media now just as well as then: “Bias, Bullshit and Lies.”

But this is what caught JMM’s ear when sitting down with Accountant recently. He just wanted one place he could go to get real information. He, like a lot of folks, wishes he could trust what was on the TV or on the web—but he can’t. “You have to read all of them to figure out what’s really going on,” he said. “And even then, you can’t be sure.”

So, like any Boomer, Account has drifted towards authority figures. Those are the folks he and even Gen X’ers like JMM were told would be arbiters of truth. He talked about a recent article from Iowa’s junior senator Joni Ernst in the Wall Street Journal detailing all that’s wrong with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and a recent report she released about federal workers. Accountant said she had really done a good job of laying out why USAID should be shut down. He trusted her.

But the piece ran in the Opinions section for a reason. While Ernst did cite specific cases of questionable outcomes over the years in her OpEd, it turns out some of it was hyperbole. And that report he mentioned: it’s been fact-checked into oblivion, particularly around Ernst’s insistence that only 6% of federal workers came into the office each week. It only took ProPublica a two-minute walk-and-talk video to dismantled that notion, showing how an unscientific survey by Federal News Network, a site targeted at federal workers, somehow ended up in Ernst’s report as fact and then broadcast out as truth. So, ultimately, Account is being—again, unsurprisingly—lied to even there.

Which tracks with Gallup’s polling. The only group the American public has less confidence in than newspapers and television news is Congress. Guess we’ll all have a lot of work to do to build that trust back again.

And Now For Some Good News

Two years ago, Press Forward seemed like a nonprofit Spider-Man, swinging in to save local journalism in its hour of need. A coalition of 22 nonprofits including the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and Henry Luce Foundation, Press Forward promised to donate $500 million over five years to support local news initiatives. That’s a hell of a lot of cash, especially to an industry struggling against multiple challenges.

The goal of all that cash was to shore up some key areas. As JMM reported back in 2023, Press Forward wanted to strengthen local newsrooms, amplify environmental coverage, increase coverage of underserved and underrepresented communities, and bolster public policies that prop up local news coverage. The organization also planned to work with More Perfect, a bipartisan group focused on protecting democracy, to ensure the funds help keep citizens informed about what their government is doing.

Two weeks ago, right before the Knight Media Forum conference, Press Forward released an impact report. It’s impressive. The report claims the organization has already invested more than $200 million in local news initiatives. The funding went to outlets such as The Haitian Times, a news site focused on covering both the struggling country and the vast Haitian diaspora that found itself at the center of the 2024 election after some of its members were falsely accused of eating dogs in Springfield, Ohio. It also supported niche projects like Hola Carolina, a Spanish-language news site and radio station in North Carolina that kept folks informed when Hurricane Helene swept through the area.

Ultimately, the organization has helped fund $170 million in grants to news outlets across the country, from Maine to New Mexico. It supported 34 local chapters, which have, in turn, raised an additional $36 million for the organization. It even gives money to the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News, which taps j-schools across the country, including the Drake School of Journalism and Mass Communication, to cover local statehouse news that otherwise might go unreported.

Of course, the issues around local news are far from solved. That’s why Press Forward is continuing to expand its network of 88 donor organizations, including the Knight Foundation. And it’s why Knight is working with other groups such as the American Journalism Project to continue to expand local news coverage. Will it be enough to fill in all the local news gaps and news deserts that have emerged around the country? Hard to tell. But it’s certainly a great start.