Why Doesn’t Anyone Trust the Media?

Anatomy of a credibility crisis

The challenges facing the establishment media are more severe today than ever before. Trust in the press is at a record low, with only a quarter of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-nine expressing confidence in media organizations. Jobs in journalism, meanwhile, are declining faster than jobs in coal mining: since 2005, the United States has lost more than one third of its newspapers and nearly three quarters of its newspaper journalism positions. Furthermore, recent years have exposed significant professional failures—from the flawed coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic to inadequate reporting on President Biden’s cognitive health. All the while, audiences sift into ever-narrower silos: Substacks, podcasts, livestreams.

Perhaps most telling is the changing relationship between media and political power. There is a palpable sense of surrender in the air. In December, ABC News agreed to pay President Trump $16 million to settle a defamation suit he had filed against the network. CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, later settled its own Trump lawsuit, also for $16 million, three weeks before securing Federal Communications Commission approval for its merger with Skydance Media. Trump has since filed a host of additional suits against media organizations, including the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and threatened the broadcast licenses of major networks.

All of this raises pressing questions: In an era of declining trust, industry collapse, and technological disruption, does the media, as we’ve historically understood it, have a future? What essential functions does professional journalism serve that cannot be replaced by other forms of information gathering and dissemination? And why, finally, do Americans view the media with such skepticism?

Harper’s Magazine invited four leading media observers to grapple with these questions and to consider how we got here in the first place, seeking neither to defend nor condemn wholesale, but to examine honestly what—if anything—we lose if traditional media continues on its current trajectory.

The following Harper’s Forum is based on a conversation that took place at the NoMo SoHo hotel, in New York City, on July 23, 2025. Harper’s Magazine editor Christopher Carroll served as moderator.

Participants:

JELANI COBB
Jelani Cobb is the dean of the Columbia Journalism School and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author, most recently, of Three or More Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here.

TAYLOR LORENZ
Taylor Lorenz is an independent journalist and the founder of User Mag, a Substack publication. She is the author of Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet.

JACK SHAFER
Jack Shafer is a media critic who has written for Politico, Reuters, and Slate. He previously edited Washington City Paper and SF Weekly.

MAX TANI
Max Tani is a reporter at Semafor covering media, politics, and technology. He previously covered the White House for Politico.

Continued on the Harper's website.