The Watchdog with David Bozell

CNN’s Brian Stelter probably didn’t mean to make the case against America’s corporate media. But by enthusiastically promoting Paramount owner David Ellison’s New York Times essay defending the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger, he did exactly that. Buried beneath the discussion of antitrust law and billion-dollar business deals was the real source of panic inside the legacy media: the possibility that someone might actually expect CNN and CBS News to report the news “straight down the middle.”

Imagine that.

Ellison committed what many journalists apparently consider an unforgivable offense. He admitted he has voted for candidates from both parties. He said he holds some conservative views and some liberal ones, “just like most Americans.” Most importantly, he promised not to bend newsrooms to fit his own political opinions. Instead, he argued journalists should answer to the facts.

None of those statements should be controversial. Yet anyone who has watched the reaction from media insiders knows plenty of people in television news regard such thinking as dangerous. Funny how “independence” suddenly becomes suspect the moment independence includes conservatives.

Ellison also argued that great news organizations should tell the story “straight down the middle.” Another perfectly reasonable statement. Another statement that somehow landed like a grenade inside the media establishment.

Perhaps the reaction shouldn’t surprise anyone. For years, many elitist legacy news organizations have treated political neutrality as if it were a concession to conservatives. Journalists who pride themselves on being “objective” somehow manage to view conservative concerns with skepticism while accepting progressive assumptions as settled fact. Move even slightly toward the political center, and accusations begin flying about “normalizing” Republicans or “appeasing” the right.

Perhaps no sentence in Ellison’s essay frightened media elites more than his acknowledgment that Americans no longer trust the press. Gallup recently found confidence in the news media has fallen to just 28 percent, the lowest level ever recorded. Among Republicans, confidence has cratered to an astonishing 8 percent.

Eight percent.

Corporate journalists have spent years insisting the problem is misinformation, social media, Donald Trump, or an uninformed public. Ellison suggested another possibility: maybe the press should look in the mirror.

He wrote, “Trust can’t be argued back, but it can be earned back — story by story, day by day.”

Exactly.

Trust isn’t rebuilt by another advertising campaign. Trust isn’t rebuilt by lecturing Americans about democracy. Trust is rebuilt when journalists stop treating half the country as a punchline, stop deciding which facts deserve attention based on partisan convenience, and stop confusing activism with reporting.

Media critics like Stelter would rather talk about ratings than credibility. Any suggestion that CNN or CBS News should broaden ideological perspectives inside the newsroom is immediately portrayed as evidence of decline rather than an opportunity to reconnect with millions of Americans who walked away long ago.

Media Research Center has spent nearly four decades documenting exactly why so many Americans lost confidence in the corporate press. Gallup’s numbers aren’t merely a warning for the media. They are an indictment.

Journalists can continue blaming everyone else for collapsing public confidence, or they can finally accept the uncomfortable truth David Ellison dared to say out loud: credibility isn’t demanded. Credibility is earned.

Apparently, in today’s media, even that idea is considered controversial.

​​​​​​Take it easy, 

David Bozell
President