I coincidentally first subscribed to Harper’s magazine when the eloquent and intellectually intimidating Lewis Lapham became editor of Harper’s magazine in 1976. Its eclectic monthly collection of essays, fiction, humor, poetry, book reviews, and deep reporting has kept me renewing every year since then. One great thing about the magazine is that a year’s subscription only costs as much as a jumbo pizza and gives readers not only each month’s magazine, but also access to its 175-year-old archive, which is chock full of amazing writing from a plethora of both famous and obscure authors.
This month, the cover piece is “Why Doesn’t Anyone Trust the Media?” That’s a subject that gets a lot of daily attention at Daily Kos and many places elsewhere. I am, for example, in two progressive email groups where much of the talk is about how to create a truly broad-based progressive media ecosystem. And nearly 60 years ago, I was a free-lancer for several alternative weekly newspapers, a previous generation’s attempt at creating such an ecosystem.
The Harper’s panel discussion was conducted by Christopher Carroll. It features Jelani Cobb, the dean of the Columbia Journalism School and a staff writer at The New Yorker; Taylor Lorenz of the User Mag substack he founded; Jack Schafer who has written for Politico, Reuters, and Slate and previously edited the Washington City Paper and SF Weekly; and Max Tani a reporter for Semafor who previously covered the White House for Politico. I would have liked to have seen journalists like Nicole Sandler, Susie Madrak, Ryan Grim, Rick Perlstein, David Dayen, and Marcy Wheeler included in this discussion. But it is what is.
Here’s an excerpt that cannot really do a 6,700-word piece justice, but may nonetheless lure you into reading the whole piece.
Christopher Carroll: Why don’t we begin with the biggest question. A Gallup poll from last year showed that the media was the least trusted civic or political institution in the United States—among other things, Americans trust Congress more than they trust the media. What accounts for this? Why don’t we trust the media?
Taylor Lorenz: Well, I think there’s a lot of culpability on the media side. Corporate media in particular has spent years selling people out and getting things wrong. Look at mainstream coverage of the Iraq War, the COVID-19 pandemic, or the genocide in Palestine. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. These media outlets do not center the lives of poor people, disabled people, immigrants, or the working class. The civil-rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis has done an excellent job reporting on how legacy news outlets push pro-police messaging. He looks at coverage of issues like crime surges or shoplifting epidemics—for instance, the widely reported but unsubstantiated claim that shoplifting forced Walgreens to close stores.
I do think that the corporate media—having worked in it myself—has done things to erode trust, whether it’s kowtowing to power or simply failing to represent the truth.
Jelani Cobb: I agree that the media has made a lot of mistakes. As you suggest, Taylor, there are some obvious ones, such as the credulous coverage that facilitated the Iraq War or, I would add, the self-interested coverage of the 2016 election.
But I’m not sure that there’s a correlation between the mistakes the media has made and the distrust the public feels toward it. Here’s what I mean: every one of us has been in a conversation in which someone says, “What the media won’t tell you . . . ” There are certain sentences that, when you hear the first half, you should immediately ignore the second half—and that’s one of them. The reason is that, 99 percent of the time, when someone says, “The media won’t tell you this,” it’s because the thing they’re talking about is either not true or is not true in the way they conceive it to be. Or they have a pet conspiracy theory that no one else shares, and the media won’t validate their viewpoint.
I also think that it’s part of a broader institutional mistrust. If you look at the decline of trust in American institutions, it is overwhelmingly connected to the dynamics of local relationships.
Local news remains the most trusted segment, yet it has also eroded the most precipitously in the past twenty years. [...]
Harper’s Index excerpts:
In case you’re not ready to plow into that, or the subject bores you, here are a handful of more succinct excerpts from the Index, some of which I hope spark discussion. The Index was created shortly after Lapham took over the editorship of the magazine for the second time in 1983, a position he held for the next 23 years. In a February 1984 column Lapham said his new Index creation was designed "to give the reader a concrete sense of the world's complexity, beauty, contradiction and size." More recently, he described the Index as a "single page of numbers that measure, in one way or another, the drifting tide of events." (At this link, you can see sources for each of these numbers.}
- Percentage of internet traffic last year that was generated by humans: 49
- That was generated by bots: 51
- Percentage by which Google searches are less likely to result in clicks if they feature an AI Overview: 47
- Portion of companies that report using AI in their business: 4/5
- Portion of those using AI for which it has not resulted in any “tangible bottom-line impact”: 5/6
- Minimum value of cryptocurrency reported stolen in the first half of this year: $2,840,000,00
- Minimum number of reported cryptocurrency thefts in this period that involved physical violence: 31
- Portion of annual U.S. deaths that would not occur if the nation’s mortality rate matched that of comparably wealthy countries: 1/4
- Portion of annual deaths among Americans aged 25–44 that would not occur: 3/5
- Percentage of Americans who favor arresting Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes if he visits the United States: 46
- Who oppose this: 32
- Portion of Republicans who say that the president should be able to revoke the citizenship of a native-born American: 1/4
- Estimated percentage of ICE detainees who are held in private, for-profit facilities: 86
- Percentage of Americans over the age of 65 who say they can tell the time on an analog clock “instantly”: 95
- Of those aged 18–30: 43
