Throughout the passed two weeks, the majority of news stories have been about Donald Trump, his cabinet and staff picks, and how wrong the media was in their assessment of the presidential election this year. Trump’s campaign has revealed media distrust as a common disposition of the American people. Throughout the election, he and many others have accused journalists and the “corrupt” media of holding political ideologies and agendas that aim to influence public opinion by sacrificing truth. This justified concern has caused trust within the media to wane, and this concern can best be alleviated in one way— required journalist partisan affiliation disclosure.
The majority of Americans do not agree. The Texas Media & Society Survey found that only 27% of people believe journalists should disclose their partisan affiliation if they report on political news. This percentage is surprisingly low given recent calls for increasing amounts of disclosure, especially compared to the 55% who do not want disclosure (16% were uncertain).
The survey also reveals a possible connection between ideological identity and opinions about journalist partisanship disclosure. Conservatives are more likely than liberals to want journalist partisan disclosure. In fact, conservatives who claim that they pay close or somewhat close attention to political news are about 1.5 times more likely to want disclosure than liberals who pay close or somewhat close attention to the news.
Arguably, liberals dislike journalist partisanship disclosure because they wish to respect journalists’ privacy. Demanding journalists to publicly disclose their political affiliations thrusts their personal lives into a more public, harsher light. Liberals might also trust journalists to filter biases out of journalist commentary and reporting.
Furthermore, liberals might believe that too much disclosure from journalists would convince audiences that their reporting is inherently biased because journalists hold any political opinions at all. The overall effect would be to increase public distrust in the media, which would not solve the increasing media distrust issue America faces today. However, liberals who argue from this point of view are at risk of protecting journalists who are indeed biased, and this protection also increases media distrust, which just contributes to the problem.
Conservatives might want more disclosure because they are concerned about media influences on public opinion. If journalists disclose their ideological affiliations, then media audiences would be less likely to accept journalist commentary and reporting as statements of fact. Believing that the media has a liberal bias only strengthens this concern, because conservatives who are fearful of a lack of disclosure view the media to be persuasively liberal, influencing public opinion.
Regardless of ideological differences, an alarming majority within both ideologies prefers journalist partisan privacy. 61.5% of liberals and 48.6% of conservatives who pay attention to political news do not want journalist partisan disclosure.
The data indicate a worrisome American confidence in people’s ability to identify journalist bias in news sources. Because these survey participants claim to pay attention to political news, they might believe that they are regularly exposed to varying opinions. If they consistently follow a single journalist, they might believe they can predict particular responses from the journalist, correctly identifying the potential bias throughout multiple stories.
While this confidence to identify bias is admirable, it is also misguided. The amount of attention paid to political news by survey participants is self-reported, meaning that people most likely overestimate their attention paid to political news. The diversity of their news could also be overestimated.
Overestimation promotes a misguided self-confidence in a person’s ability to decipher what information is actually informative and a journalist’s potential bias. Required journalist partisanship disclosure can combat that overestimation. The fear that journalists interpret and inform their political news through their affiliations is warranted and disclosure helps absolve that fear.
Journalist partisan disclosure promotes trust in media because it gives audiences more information to make their own informed opinions and conclusions. To not want disclosure would be to not want more relevant information. To give credence to cliques, “knowledge itself [really] is power.”