Why Is Trust in Media Spiralling Downward?

Trust in journalism is not an abstract concern. Democracies depend on citizens having access to reliable information, especially when governments are making decisions about health, civil liberties, national unity and reconciliation. When people no longer believe the press is giving them a fair account of events, they retreat into competing information systems, each with its own facts and suspicions.

That is why I wanted to speak with Tara Henley about her new book, The Trust Spiral: Why the Media Needs Objectivity. Henley has worked in Canadian journalism for 25 years, including nearly a decade at the CBC, and now hosts the independent Lean Out podcast. She has experienced both legacy and independent media from the inside.

The central question was not whether every criticism of the press is justified. It was whether journalists have been too quick to blame social media, hostile politicians and misinformation while avoiding a harder examination of their own decisions.

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What Broke the Trust?

Henley begins with the scale of the problem: “We are seeing plummeting trust across the Western world in the media.”

News leaders often point to forces outside the newsroom. Social platforms reward outrage. Political figures attack reporters. False claims spread rapidly online. Henley accepts that these pressures matter, but argues they are incomplete.

“We need to look at what we in the media have done, especially in the last ten years, that has got us lower trust,” she told me.

Her account begins around Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign. Many journalists concluded that an extraordinary candidate required extraordinary measures. Traditional practices appeared inadequate for a figure who antagonized the press, made outlandish claims and benefited from enormous media attention.

The problem, in Henley’s view, was that temporary exceptions became a broader change in journalistic culture.

“Guardrails exist for a reason. And once you take them down, you can’t contain that.”

She argues that a more activist approach then spread to other major stories, including the racial reckoning, the MeToo movement and the pandemic. The concern is not that journalists should be indifferent to injustice. It is that when reporting becomes organized around a desired social outcome, facts that complicate the preferred narrative may receive less attention.

For Henley, the public’s objection is ultimately straightforward: “I think the problem that the public has most with us is our lack of accuracy.”

Objectivity Was Never the Absence of Bias

The word “objectivity” creates resistance because it can sound like a claim that journalists have no values or political preferences. Henley is making a different argument.

She traces objectivity to the development of journalism as a set of practices intended to limit personal bias. Verification, evidence, multiple sources, fair representation of competing claims and a willingness to correct the record were never supposed to make journalists perfectly neutral. They were meant to make their work more reliable.

The distinction in her answer was important. Objectivity is not a personality trait. It is a discipline.

Henley connected this history to the penny press, when newspapers moved away from acting openly as propaganda arms for political parties and toward subscription and advertising models. The resulting standards were partly a response to earlier reporting failures, political manipulation and public suspicion.

Critics of objectivity argue that traditional conventions can disguise power and privilege. Henley’s response is that removing those conventions has produced a less restrained press without creating a more trustworthy one. Her standard is not whether a story advances the correct cause. It is whether the reporting can withstand scrutiny after the political temperature falls.

How Did the Profession Become Narrower?

Henley’s argument becomes more complicated when she turns to economics.

The collapse of the traditional news business model has eliminated local jobs, centralized newsrooms and made journalism increasingly precarious. At the same time, entering the profession often requires expensive education, poorly paid internships and the ability to live in high-cost cities.

“This is now, strangely, paradoxically, an elite profession,” she said.

The result is a press corps that may be diverse in some visible ways but increasingly similar in education, geography, class and political outlook. Henley described journalists as disproportionately urban, secular, highly educated and progressive. That does not mean they coordinate their coverage or consciously promote a political party. It means they may share assumptions without recognizing them as assumptions.

I wanted to understand whether the trust crisis was primarily ideological or economic. Henley’s answer was that the two are connected. A weakened industry has fewer reporters on the ground, less mentorship and less tolerance for internal dissent. Under those conditions, errors become more likely and challenges to newsroom consensus become more costly.

Can Journalism Admit When It Was Wrong?

The strongest test of any institution is what it does after a failure.

Henley pointed to several stories she believes deserve serious review: school closures, vaccine mandates, the trucker convoy and reporting on alleged graves at former residential schools. Her argument was not that every original concern was illegitimate. It was that the media should revisit what was known, which claims were supported, which were overstated and what consequences followed.

“We need to start having some mea culpas,” she said.

That does not require replacing one sweeping narrative with another. The documented abuse of residential schools can be acknowledged while specific claims still require evidence. The disruption caused by the convoy can be recognized while the press re-examines claims about violence, extremism and foreign funding. Public-health decisions can be judged in the context of uncertainty while still asking whether dissenting evidence was dismissed too quickly.

“How do we get to more accurate information? That’s my central concern.”

So why is trust in media spiralling downward? Henley’s answer is that the press weakened its own standards while its economic foundations were deteriorating. Too many journalists became socially isolated from the people they covered, too many institutions treated criticism as hostility, and too few major outlets publicly examined stories that went wrong.

Rebuilding trust would require better business models, broader newsroom cultures, stronger reporting practices and visible accountability. It would also require the public to accept that responsible journalism will sometimes produce answers it dislikes.

Watch or listen to the full interview with Tara Henley, and let me know: is the collapse in media trust mainly the result of outside attacks, or did journalism bring much of it on itself?