CNN, NBC, NYT, NPR chiefs confronted on how the media can restore trust among Americans

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Prominent journalists and executives of several news organizations were confronted with the question of how the media restores trust among the American people. 

Semafor, the digital news platform founded in 2022 by legacy media veterans Ben Smith and Justin B. Smith (no relation), held a summit Thursday featuring a stacked line-up of news chiefs and personalities across the ideological spectrum to discuss the current state of the media. 

The summit, called “Innovating to Restore Trust in News,” began with Gallup chairman Jim Clifton sounding the alarm on the latest polling that showed just 31% of Americans trust the media either a “great deal” or a “fair amount,” putting emphasis on those polled that only 8% of them have a “great deal” of trust. 

“The current state of media in this country is either in last place or second-to-last place compared to every single other institution… Somebody does need to fix this,” Clifton said. 

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CNN CEO Mark Thompson said he himself doesn’t trust “mass media,” citing his instinct as a journalist to question everything.

“I think I’d rather have a questioning audience than a compliant audience that is kind of differential to media,” Thompson said. “I think we should sort of, you know, use a box of Kleenex to dry our eyes about the loss of traditional trust and try to figure out how to rebuild almost an adult relationship instead of regarding our audience as sheep who need to be trusting and to believe everything we say.”

However, as far as gaining people’s trust, Thompson insisted CNN’s solution is “staying true” to its decades-long brand as a hub for news and “trying very hard to be accurate” while keeping its focus on straight news rather than opinion. 

New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn said one way he thinks his paper seeks trust is by having consumers get to know the “personality” of its journalists with on-camera or podcast appearances to discuss their reporting and newsgathering process. He shrugged off polls that broadly show growing distrust in media, insisting the data is “pretty flawed.” 

Semafor’s Ben Smith, a former columnist for the Times, asked Kahn whether he felt the need to seek out conservative journalists since the newsroom is “about as liberal as you’d expect.” 

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“I don’t really think about it as going out and hiring conservatives anymore that I’m thinking about as going out and hiring liberals,” Kahn responded. “I do want to hire more people who come from different geographies, different personal experiences, different backgrounds, different schools, different education, whatever it is, because you’re right that actually part of your own personal experience often where you grew up, who you grew up with, whether you’re part of a religious family, did you have any military experience, those actually can open your eyes and ideas to a different kind of journalism, a different perspective on the news. We should have diversity in that way. It is important.” 

“That’s not the same thing as saying I’m gonna to go out and look for someone who voted for Trump and put them on my staff. As a newsroom, I don’t think that’s exactly the right incentive,” Kahn added. 

NBCUniversal News Group Chairman Cesar Conde suggested the solution to combat media distrust is investing in local media. 

“The underlying strength of a democracy is a strong and free and independent press. And the backbone of our media industry is our local stations,” Conde said. “So for us as a broadcast network, the backbone of our business is our local TV stations. We have a huge footprint in local TV and local digital around the country, and what we have found is that is actually a huge competitive advantage for us, not only for building trust, hopefully over time, but also for reporting. There’s so many, increasingly news stories that are originated as local news stories and then become to have national importance.”

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NPR CEO Katherine Maher turned the tables and urged media outlets to “trust your audience.”

“We keep talking about how to ensure that we are trusted. It’s actually trust your audience. They’re smart people,” Maher said. “You know, that was one of the things that we learned at Wikimedia, is like, show our work, be very clear where we got the information that’s on there. Have confidence that the audience knows exactly the limits of how they’re going to use this information… At NPR, I think that our goal is not to be trusted. It is to be trustworthy.”

She explained, “As somebody who didn’t come up through the ranks of journalism, journalism is really remarkable in terms of being a fairly self-regulating industry. Journalists who don’t practice the craft well are known by their peers for perhaps being a little bit lazy or shoddy. And you don’t tend to find them at really high-quality news organizations, right? That is not what the public knows. The public doesn’t know what goes into the decisions about how you report a story. They don’t know why you’ve chosen to edit a certain part of an interview… No to lean too hard on Wikipedia but like 90% of people don’t check the citations. It’s the fact that the citations are there that’s a form of accountability. It’s trustworthy versus assuming trust and wondering why people don’t trust you.”

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Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier said his approach to journalism is being “tough but fair,” and that removing “emotion” from reporting plays a key role in earning trust among Americans. 

“What I think more people need to do, and what I try to do and have tried to do is take the emotion out of it, to take the emotion out of covering the news,” Baier said. “And I think over time, over the years, that has been a problem and that some people got emotional about it and lost half the audience.”

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Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker similarly expressed the importance of taking emotion out of reporting, agreeing with the notion that Washington journalists are “freaking out” about President Trump too much.

“The stories are extraordinary that are coming out every day. And you know, we, as the journal, we’re covering them. We’re not adding any spin, we’re not adding any emotion to it because I think these stories speak for themselves. And I think it’s too early yet to say whether the meltdown is justified,” Tucker said. “There’s no room for emotion at the Journal… We’re trying to give people good information, information that they can use, that’s valuable, that’s helpful, and if we start bringing emotion into it, it becomes less valuable. So I think our strength is, our strength in particular, is taking the emotion out of it, and it might be different for other outlets, but not for us.”

Tucker stressed that her paper’s journalists are “observers, not participants” and has asked them to “check their biases” so that their personal views don’t impact their reporting. 

She also put emphasis on being “radically focused on the audience.”

“Don’t think about what’s the rest of the newsroom gonna think? Or is this gonna win me a prize?… What are other journalists gonna think? That cannot be the motivating force behind journalism. It has to be- what are we doing that is useful for readers? What are we telling them that they didn’t know? What are we telling them that adds value to their lives?” Tucker said. “And I think the fourth thing that I’d say about that is you have to not be afraid of the consequences of what you’re going to publish. I think particularly in a place like Washington, where you’re in this kind of feeble bubble where everybody’s got something to say on it, it’s very easy to start being afraid of what the consequences of something you’re going to publish might be. But I think it’s really important that you don’t do that. You come at each piece individually.” 

“I mean, a good example of that was the Biden age story that we did,” she continued. “Some of my colleagues in New York warned me that this would lead to- have quite a strong reaction. I have no idea quite how strong, but anyway- but I’m very glad that I didn’t stop to think about it because it was an important piece of journalism, and we published it, you know, as we did.”

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Other high-profile interviews from the summit included former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, Sirius XM host Megyn Kelly, and FCC chair Brendan Carr. 

Semafor’s summit was held in an intimate hall inside Washington D.C.’s Gallup Building where Semafor’s D.C. office is located. Attendees were largely made up of media journalists from several news outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR and The Daily Beast as well as Semafor journalists and staffers. 

Among those also spotted in the audience were former CNN CEO Chris Licht and journalist Mark Halperin.