Fragmentation

By Beau Baker.

News anchor Walter Cronkite was said to be the “most trusted man in America” during his time at the helm of CBS’s Evening News. He cut a paternal figure and weighed in on some of our country’s most tumultuous years, some of its most tragic and uplifting moments. In the mid-1960s, when most households owned a TV and tuned in to one of the network newscasts, Cronkite reigned supreme.

Was Cronkite “trusted” because of his credentials as a news reporter? Perhaps, though American University Professor Joseph Campbell pushes back on that notion. Or, was the respect he garnered tied to the television age and its role in manufacturing recognizable, public figures? Cronkite Biographer Douglas Brinkley points out:

“Everybody liked Walter Cronkite. He had a voice that everybody recognized. It’s like hearing Bob Dylan sing a song. … In five seconds everybody in America knows who’s talking. That’s important for a broadcaster.”

Cronkite was known, familiar, and therefore trusted. He was also one of the few. He was popularized by broadcast television, which along with radio, newspapers and periodicals, made up the whole of news sources. This relatively narrow field of institutional information channels appears to have allowed CBS and Cronkite to fashion trust out of visibility, journalistic credibility out of a high-profile TV platform.

During Cronkite’s heyday, most Americans were getting their news from only a few content-controlled sources. The news was delivered–to your door, through your screen, over the airwaves–and the stations and publishers providing it were inherently trusted, in part because they existed in a vacuum.

Those days are gone.

“I long for the day when we all watched the same thing and then drew our own conclusions. There wasn’t the choice, and now there is so much choice. What you get to choose is your slant and then you can rip apart anybody who doesn’t have your value system and disagrees with your choices.”
–Molly (age 60)

With the advent of the internet and the proliferation of news media, our notions of trust are foggier than ever. With so many choices, we can lose our ability to make sound judgments about the information we digest. Online news is constant, accessible, tailored to our politics, our consumer preferences and even our web habits through algorithmic design. We now can choose what news we want, from where we want it, anytime. The institutional pillars that once made up news reporting have been toppled, leaving us searching for trust in the rubble.

Obviously, the internet, Tower of Babel though it may be, is a boon to the dissemination of information, opinion and truth. But it’s messy, with advertisers gunning for space and attention, fake news flooding feeds and hemming in our view, and trigger-happy tweets stirring up sensation and suspicion. Where does our trust land in this sordid milieu?

On top of all that, findings from the Pew Research Center show political bias can be highly determinative of trust. The most trusted sources for news tend to be those catering to party lines. The Pew study showed Fox News is the main news source for nearly 50% of conservatives.

The hyper-partisan landscape is also a money making machine, creating niche markets for sites that do everything from hawking conspiracy theories to selling miracle supplements. News has always been in the business of selling, but now there’s considerably more pressure for media to capture consumer loyalty and sell their particular brand of news. When we align our values to that brand or image instead of the journalism behind it, our definition of trust may well be warped.

The internet and technology give the average news consumer complete control of the content they consume. While this brings personal freedom into a sphere that traditionally operated out of the hands of a few, it also creates the potential for subjective, self-determined ideas of trust and “good journalism.”

In 2012, David Tewksbury and Jason Rittenberg postulated some of the perils of this freedom in their treatise News On The Internet:

“A central component in the potential for the development of fragmentation and polarization is the extent to which people are willing to specialize their news consumption. Many online news providers have clearly moved toward segmentation, but their efforts will result in fragmentation and polarization only if people choose to select focused content and opt out of browsing among many outlets and topics. Ultimately, then, audience behavior is very likely the key element to watch as news delivery and consumption develop in the years ahead.” (p. 143)

Indeed, that fragmentation and polarization is our present reality and specialized consumption has become the norm. We’ve shifted media paradigms.

The media fallout following the 2016 election was a reminder of how a changing news landscape could foster mistrust and inhibit our ability to get the facts straight. Tewksbury and Rittenberg (2012) suggested as much: “In a fragmented society, the public agenda and mass political behavior are unpredictable.” (142)

Meanwhile, fierce polarization is eroding the middle. We’re less and less inclined to share space with our political opponents, or to even consider different viewpoints.

Politics and values have always bled into trust, but now that influence seems especially potent.

It turns out that conservatives show more of a willingness to consume news they distrust then liberals. More conservatives watch news on one of the major broadcast television networks than liberals do, even though they say they trust network news less. Is this willingness to find common ground, or just a generational artifact from the Cronkite era?

CBS’s Cronkite had the luxury of a loud megaphone atop a small hill, and those days are over, as Michael Griffin, an associate professor at Macalester, observed:

“We don’t just sit back and watch the evening news and believe Walter Cronkite when he says, “And that’s the way it is,” or pick up a daily newspaper feeling as though its editors will sort and summarize for us the important news we need to know about that day. We can’t, or don’t, do that anymore—and that’s the challenge.”

In the age of old media giants, trust was predicated on being in the business of news. Scarcity lent credence and centralized dissemination kept consumer fragmentation at bay. Now, we face a much more complex and disorienting media landscape, one where trust must be redefined, tested anew and most importantly, preserved.