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On Monday, Jelani Cobb, dean of the Columbia Journalism School and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, delivered the 2025 Reuters Memorial Lecture at Oxford University.
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Journalism is the work of reporting the news. Often events transpire at such a pace that it is difficult to find a discrete beginning and end with which to frame one’s reporting. We have a well-worn phrase for moments like that: “This is a developing story.” I began working on this speech while thinking of one set of challenges to the public’s trust in news media but, in light of recent events, have been forced to consider a very different set of implications to that idea. I do not yet have all the facts, yet circumstance warrants that I at least touch upon events that have transpired in my country and on my own campus at Columbia University. So, to borrow a phrase, “this is a developing speech.” I will deliver the original version of this talk. Then I will attach an addendum meant to reflect other concerns that warrant attention. My original speech begins with these words:
Five years ago this week the city of New York, where I live, introduced a series of protocols in response to a pathogen that was then being called the “novel coronavirus.” Those protocols, which eventually came to be known as lockdown, urged residents to remain at home, if at all possible, to avoid gathering in crowds, to wash their hands frequently, and to designate a single individual who would conduct the grocery shopping, thereby minimizing the number of potential exposures any one household might experience. A New York Times headline from that week screamed “Italy Announces Restrictions over Entire Country in Attempt to Halt Coronavirus.”
Reports about the virus’s impact in other parts of the world, particularly China, where it originated, and Italy, where it spread with such velocity that the entire nation had shut down, ricocheted around the internet. News reports informed us that we should expect this emergency plan to be in effect for one to two weeks. A local news station ran a story about the first infected person in New York City and the severity of his symptoms. As a picture of the jeopardy we faced began to take shape, my own household, like hundreds of thousands of others in the city, began to make plans. At the time our household consisted of myself, my wife, our two-year-old daughter, Lenox, and our five-month-old twin sons, August and Hollis. We divided household tasks, recognizing that we would have to manage without childcare. I phoned my twenty-two-year-old nephew, who was preparing for a spring break trip to Florida, and told him to cancel his plans. I sent him money and urged him to go to his local market and purchase enough groceries to last for a month. I then began what seemed to be the simplest, most logical course of action but was, in fact, one of the most complicated, consequential, and political acts of the entire pandemic: identifying news sources that were carrying relevant information about the emerging pandemic.
I am far from a neutral observer here. At the time, I was in my fourth year on the faculty of one of the finest journalism schools in the world and my fifth year as a staff writer for The New Yorker. I was able to contact friends who had decades of experience reporting on healthcare, epidemiology, and public health. It was not difficult for me to get word of what types of coverage different outlets were planning as the crisis unfolded. But I was also aware, even in that early moment, that many people saw the emerging crisis in a different light. About a week earlier I’d attended the convention of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) in Northern Virginia for a story I was working on. As I stood in a line waiting to enter the convention hall, two men behind me discussed the “hoax” that was being fomented by liberal media. The purported virus, one told the other, did not exist and was simply an invention crafted to tank the economy and thereby diminish the likelihood of Donald Trump being reelected that November. This was the first time that I’d heard such sentiments in person, but on the internet they already had the ring of familiarity. Theories ranged from the complete nonexistence of what eventually came to be known as the COVID-19 virus to the theories holding that it had come about as some form of sophisticated biological warfare created by China and intended to destabilize the West.
In Manhattan our days bled into each other, a ceaseless and isolated stream of diaper changes, feedings, laundry, bathings, and bottle preparation. We followed protocols. When it became known that the COVID virus was airborne, we masked; we avoided unnecessary gatherings; and, when the COVID vaccines became available the following year, ours was among the earlier families to be vaccinated. I later joked that the miracle of that first COVID spring was not that we managed to avoid infection but rather that none of us chewed off a limb to escape that apartment. Yet it was also clear that our actions stemmed directly from the information in which we placed credence. We reliably read reporters like Don McNeil in the New York Times, Ed Yong in The Atlantic, Zeynep Tufekci, also in the Times. One of my earliest conversations was with Laurie Garrett, who had covered pandemics for years before that one emerged. Newer outlets like STAT News provided cutting-edge information about the evolving medical and scientific understanding of the virus, its behaviors and its potential weaknesses. At the same time, a growing disdain for this consensus was easy to find. Fueled by the suspicions and cynicism of an entirely different information ecosystem—one prominently anchored in social media and often, though not exclusively, right-wing news outlets—a differing set of behaviors emerged: a mirror-image reversal in which both preventative measures like masks and immunological ones like vaccines were equally disdained.
With retrospective clarity it seems obvious that the events we experienced beginning five years ago were not simply a replay of that established literary trope of humankind vs. nature, but rather a contest of dueling information systems—two feuding epistemologies and the distribution networks that ferried their disparate conclusions to their polarized constituencies.
There is no need to walk through the remainder of this story: we recall the gradual way in which the virus’s grip was pried from our civic lives, the curious way in which the decibel of the arguments over COVID decreased in proportion with the falling numbers of infections globally. We moved on—as individuals and societies, as a planet, our fractures increasingly faint. But what remains strikingly relevant in this moment in which a different brand of dissension, acrimony, and bitterness has defined our civic lives internationally, nurtured authoritarian movements across the globe, and threatened the viability of democracy is the simple, profound question beneath the COVID-era conflicts: Who do you trust?
Machiavelli posited that those who would wield power must utilize some ratio of force and fraud. Democracy, however, demands of us a third F—faith, the fundamental trust in the rationality of one’s fellow citizens, a belief that the institutions upon which society depends are capable and willing to execute the tasks with which they are charged. This is not a naive, credulous faith, which is why democracies require mechanisms to counterbalance and check the power of their various official structures, but nonetheless the system of self-governance requires a portion of trust that this clamorous, idealistic scheme is capable of functioning. It’s easy to see that the opposite of democracy is despotism; it is somewhat more difficult to discern an equal truth, that the opposite of democracy is cynicism. (It is no coincidence, for instance, that conspiracy theories, no matter their provenance, subject matter, or target audience, share one common trait in that they almost always begin with the most cynical possible assumptions about the situation they purport to explain.)
It’s for this reason that we have devoted such time and energy to trying to understand the declining trust people across national boundaries place in an array of public institutions, most prominently the focus of today’s discussion: journalism. No one here needs to be told how complicated and fraught this situation is, but it is worth noting that five years after its onset, the COVID pandemic remains the most vital example of the real-world consequences that this lack of trust can inspire. Last year, the Reuters Institute itself noted the severity of this situation, observing that just 40 percent of respondents across forty-seven markets say they trust most news.
These observations are in good intellectual company in the United States, where this issue has been relentlessly surveyed and examined. Earlier this year, the Edelman Trust Institute reported a link between political or social grievance and distrust in institutions. Not surprisingly, those who felt the most aggrieved had the least faith in institutions. These grievances were directed at business, at government, and, particularly, at media.
At the same time, this declining trust has emerged at a crisis moment in which millions of people across the globe rightfully feel that institutions they’ve trusted have failed to deliver for them. The surge of populist anger that has upset the political orders across the globe did not come from nowhere. Notably, the Edelman report cites a “generation” of grievances that predate the global economic crisis of 2008 and factor into later social convulsions like Brexit and the 2016 US presidential election. In this light, conflict over the handling of the pandemic is just the latest in a long series of social dislocations that have produced widespread distrust. Add into this mix the difficult economic fortunes of a broadening swath of middle-class and formerly middle-class households and the astounding growth of capital for the wealthiest sliver of Western economies, and a picture begins to come into focus. The autocratic currents that have seized upon this populist anger have, in country after country including, most notably, the United States, offered simplistic, tribalistic explanations for their hardship. We all know the playbook—the demagogic demonization of ethnic and religious groups and the hallmark attacks upon institutions of accountability like journalism. In a moment of notable candor during a 2016 conversation with the journalist Leslie Stahl, Donald Trump reportedly stated that his relentless attacks upon the press were designed to achieve a specific objective. “I do it,” Stahl later reported, “so that when you write negative stories about me, people won’t believe you.”
It should be noted that journalism confronts an inherent disadvantage in challenging demagoguery. The hallmark of quality journalism is its ability to render the complexities of the world in their proper nuances and details. Demagogues have no need for such subtleties. They paint in broad strokes and primary colors. Our first allegiance is to the truth. Here demagogues are again liberated. In January 2021 the Washington Post’s rolling tracker identified over thirty thousand lies or misleading statements uttered by Donald Trump during his first presidency. Any journalist present knows that politicians lie. Yet what distinguishes the garden-variety political prevarication from the demagogue-level fabrication is the ease and volume with which these untruths pour forth. In any case, the demagogue’s rendering of the world is legible, understandable. All problems have clear solutions and all life’s difficulties are easily attributable to specific culprits. We are tasked with delivering information that challenges the beliefs or worldview of our audiences. The demagogue exists solely to confirm his audience’s most base and volatile presumptions. In this context there is an inverse ratio between our vulnerability and our credibility. Our problem is not simply that the public does not trust us, it’s that they do trust other dishonest brokers. We are not just witnessing a crisis of credibility, we are experiencing a crisis of credulity as well.
We have, particularly in the United States, often been slow to adapt to this state of affairs, operating on protocols that no longer apply in new circumstances. During the first Trump administration the American press was reluctant to refer to blatant untruths as lies or to refer to outright trafficking in racial stereotypes as racist behavior. Our own credulity led to the press treating an autocratic president in the same manner as a democratic one. In my public comments I took to describing this as the Left-Handed Problem of the American Press. Consider for a moment any sport you’ve played. This exercise is particularly relevant to those who played basketball, softball, baseball, tennis, and especially anyone who has boxed. Now, consider the first time you competed against a left-handed opponent. As a young baseball player I devoted hours to learning how to hit a curveball. After a great deal of effort I learned how to anticipate a pitch that would move down and away from a right-handed batter. But these rules are useless when facing a left-handed pitcher because the ball moves in exactly the opposite direction. In applying conventional approaches to left-handed opponents, a player will find him- or herself precisely 180 degrees away from where they should be. In this analogy, the press is the right-handed player consistently befuddled by the left-handed administration, in which everything moves in exactly the opposite direction.
The early days of the second Trump term have been greeted by a different and more troubling trend in the American press—capitulation. Ahead of last year’s election the owners of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post intervened to prevent their editorial boards from endorsing the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris. In both instances the moves were interpreted as efforts to curry favor with the Republican nominee, Donald Trump. In the case of the Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, spiking the Harris endorsement was understood as an effort to protect his other businesses, particularly Blue Origin, Bezos’s space exploration company, which depends upon hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts. Given Trump’s antagonism toward Bezos during his first term, it was not difficult to imagine that those contracts would have been vulnerable in a second Trump term. Notably, ABC News paid $15 million to settle a lawsuit Trump filed against the network and anchor George Stephanopolous for misstating the nature of the civil ruling against Trump for sexual abuse in a case brought against him by the writer E. Jean Carroll. More recently, Paramount, the parent company of the CBS network, which hosts the show 60 Minutes, explored settling a weak suit for $10 billion Trump brought for what he alleged was deceptive editing of an interview with Kamala Harris. These are right-handed responses. As Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Center at Columbia University, wrote last month in a New York Times op-ed, “Each settlement weakens the democratic freedoms on which these media organizations depend. They create precedents—not legal ones, but precedents nonetheless—that will shape the way that judges and the public think about press freedom and its limits. They also damage the media institutions’ prestige and credibility.”
This behavior raises serious questions about the willingness of these outlets to report aggressively on the administration and compounds the crisis of trustworthiness. If we aspire to the public trust, we have to begin by delivering what we have so often declared to be the point of all this effort: accountability, facts, information delivered without fear or favor. At worst, this capitulation suggests news organizations or at least the individuals who own them have failed to grasp the full implications of the current moment. (This should remind us that even the person who brings a knife to a gunfight is infinitely better equipped than the person who brought a bottle of wine because he thought it was a dinner party.)
In this regard, the Associated Press warrants particular attention. As my colleague Margaret Sullivan noted in a column this morning, their steadfast refusal to adhere to the president’s demand that they refer to the body of water commonly known as the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” is an example of what courage looks like. The petulant consequence for this refusal, which is consistent with the AP’s stylebook, has been the banning of the organization from White House briefings and having their reporters and photographers disallowed from traveling with the president. In response, the AP has filed suit on First Amendment grounds. Yet even this example of courage highlights the relative dearth of it in other places. It is odd that any news organization, certainly any American one, would continue to attend White House briefings or travel with the president while a reputable outlet has been exiled for a decision made on editorial principle. History will hold us accountable for our behavior in moments like this one.
None of these shortcomings fully explains the crises of credibility and credulity, but they exacerbate the problems. The Reuters Institute’s report suggested several dynamics that are at the heart of this phenomenon, including partisanship, age, and education. I would like to include an additional element: proximity. It has been widely noted that the biggest impact of the disruption of journalism’s business model has been felt on the local level. At least 320 local publications in the UK shuttered between 2009 and 2019. In the United States, a recent survey discovered that the nation had lost more than one third of the newspapers that existed just twenty years ago.
This is significant because people understand their relationships with local institutions differently than they do their connections with much bigger national ones. It has been well established that the death of a newspaper does not simply affect the fortunes of the journalists and editors employed there but rather brings about a whole raft of consequences for the community itself, including declining participation in civic life and lower rates of voting. Proximity, however, has another notable effect. It’s long been known that citizens hold Congress in low regard. A Gallup poll from 2023 found that just 32 percent of Americans trusted Congress, as compared with 67 percent who trusted local government to handle their most pressing problems. This was not shocking. The significant finding is that even those who distrust national government tend to see their own congressional representative in a much more favorable light—even if they didn’t vote for that person. In 2022, a Knight Foundation study found a seventeen-point gap in the trust respondents afforded to local news outlets and the level of trust they gave to bigger national ones. This trend was consistent even across lines of partisanship. This correlates with broader themes, particularly in American history. The population has consistently distrusted large, anonymous institutions that exerted a great deal of authority over their lives. In the nineteenth century, Americans distrusted the railroad trusts; in the early twentieth century they distrusted the newly corporatized banks. Now the powerful, remote national institution for which they reserve their disdain is the broader institutional media.
In this context, the declining trust in media cannot be understood apart from the declining trust in lots of other institutions. But what is perhaps more telling is what types of institutions are consistently the most trusted by Americans—the military, small businesses, and the police. The first two are not hard to understand. The military, in the United States as in many other countries, is associated with the nation’s strengths, its virtues, and its readiness. Small business is, almost by definition, the most local of the institutions a person would regularly encounter. But the last of them—the police—seemed incongruent, at least to me. At first I suspected that the polls had undercounted people of color or poor people whose encounters with law enforcement are often more fraught and intimidating. Then I recalled a quirk of the American system of policing: there are nearly eighteen thousand police departments in the United States, most of which have fewer than fifty (and often fewer than twenty-five) officers on their payroll. When most Americans think of the police, they think of people whom they may know by face or even by name, someone rooted in their community who has children in the local school system.
The crisis of our business model has most heavily damaged precisely the most trusted segment of journalism. I can take this argument a step further and suggest that our crisis of democracy is an amalgamation of many local crises. Given the implications that have been highlighted in the course of this talk, this situation is highly concerning. Yet I’m increasingly convinced that forums in which we ponder how we regain the public’s trust are asking the wrong question. We will not remedy the cratering of local news—or any of the other contributing factors—any time soon. Our quest for public trust also highlights a contradiction that should be easily recognizable. Journalists are, by disposition and professional protocol, among the least trusting individuals you’ll ever meet. I’m reminded of the journalist John Chancellor’s favorite adage: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
Rather than hope for a return of a more trusting public, we should work for a more equitably skeptical one. Do not trust us. In fact, don’t easily trust anyone. Let doubt proliferate. Not the cynicism I spoke of earlier in this talk, but a well-calibrated skepticism. Journalism will always require some element of public trust—we will, for instance, continue to rely upon anonymous sources into the foreseeable future. But we should strive to minimize the extent to which we ask anyone to take us—or anyone else—at their word. In this way we address the questions of both credibility and credulity.
It follows that news organizations must adhere to our codes of ethics more scrupulously than ever before. Crucially, when we make mistakes, we should not hesitate to own up to them. As Margaret Sullivan pointed out in a conversation the other day, only organizations that are devoted to getting it right will ever tell you when they got it wrong. In this regard, the definition of an untrustworthy news organization is one that has never deemed it necessary to issue a correction.
How, you may ask, do we then inspire the public to believe what is being reported? Journalism should steal a page from the social sciences, where every source is documented, and the hard sciences, where every finding must be replicable. In those arenas showing how you derived your conclusions has long been a professional requirement. Every piece of significant journalism should be accompanied by a hyperlink with a caption that says “How this story was reported,” where a reader or viewer can find the documents, interviews, and research that went into the story they just consumed. If so inclined, the reader should be able to trace these steps and draw the same conclusions. Not only does this minimize the argument that the news is, as some cynics speculated, simply made up, it would throw down a gauntlet before other types of outlets that we must now compete against for public influence. Our great strength is that we report, we probe, we seek answers. In short, we are prepared to show our work. A healthy, well-informed public is one that demands that the competing sources of so-called information do the same.
Those were my original comments. I finished them in the midst of a caffeine-fueled all-nighter that reinforced to me that working through the night at fifty-five is very different than doing so at twenty-five. Around 5am I gathered my things and headed to John F. Kennedy Airport for my flight here. En route I learned that federal agents had detained a member of the Columbia community who was one of the primary organizers of last year’s encampments at Columbia protesting the Gaza war. Details remain hazy, but it has been reported that both this person’s visa and his green card were revoked under the 1952 Immigration and Security Act, a piece of Cold War legislation that was commonly weaponized against Jewish immigrants during anti-Semitic purges of alleged subversives. A day earlier the Trump administration had announced its intention to cancel $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University as a consequence for the institution’s alleged failure to take the problem of anti-Semitism seriously. Two weeks prior to that I hosted a Zoom conversation at Columbia with the historian Ellen Schrecker. Professor Schrecker’s scholarship examines the ways in which the McCarthy era in the United States impacted American higher education. (I recommend her book No Ivory Tower to anyone seeking to understand how the current era of government repression of higher education may play out.) During the question-and-answer session, Professor Schrecker pointed out an odd tendency of universities to not only fold under pressure of McCarthy-era targeting of their faculty and students but to do so while deploying the language of free speech and academic freedom. These three distinct moments suggest that even if humans with a great deal of power do not possess a sense of irony, history very much does.
I am aware that the subject of this gathering today is to discuss matters of relevance to journalism. The connection I see here is this: institutions are created in order to codify values. Our universities, our governments, certainly our news organizations were meant to not only embody particular principles but to assure that they can be preserved and transmitted across generations. Values are meant to guide us in difficult times—in the easy times we already know what to do. The paradox, of course, is that the minute you establish something based upon principle, you are confronted by the question of when you will bend for expediency. Professor Schrecker made one additional point that warrants repetition here: that capitulation never resulted in salvation. Indeed it seemed only to embolden the most zealous antagonists. We thereby confront an old paradox of those who sought to save the house from a fire but unwittingly left it to perish in the flood.
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