Pandering to Trump supporters doesn't work
There are ways to rebuild trust in journalism, but abandoning your core values isn't one of them
Last week I wrote about CBS News’ baffling decision to hire Mick Mulvaney, a former Trump White House Chief of Staff who was previously best known for lying relentlessly to journalists and being intimately involved in the decision to withhold arms from Ukraine.
Since then, Jeremy Barr at the Washington Post got his hands on audio of CBS News co-president Neeraj Khemlani explaining the newsroom’s philosophy toward hiring partisan operatives as news contributors. In the recording, which was recorded prior to Mulvaney’s hiring announcement, Khemlani explains that “getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms. A lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.”
This is dubious enough — surely there are ways to gain access without putting the people you’re trying to gain access to on your payroll — but later in the story an unnamed CBS staffer offers additional justification for the hiring: “A senior CBS News producer addressed the backlash to the Mulvaney hiring on Tuesday by pointing to the 74.2 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2020,” Barr writes.
Note, for starters, that nobody defending the hire is arguing that Mulvaney’s presence on the network will leave CBS viewers better informed. But I want to unpack that reasoning from the senior producer a bit, because it’s something that’s come up over and over again since Trump took the White House: news outlets under fire for hiring former Trump officials with well-documented histories of lying and corruption often defend their decisions by pointing to the need to gain trust among Republican viewers.
Former CNN chief Jeff Zucker, for instance, saw himself as having a mandate to “make CNN feel fair to viewers in red states,” according to a 2016 Variety profile. Putting Trumpy commentators on air, according to a 2018 analysis, “regularly helps CNN maintain its down-the-middle positioning.”
More broadly, newsroom managers have been obsessed with the question of “how to make Trump voters like us” since 2015. The industry’s collective response to that question has mainly involved bending over backward to accommodate far-right viewpoints that are often antithetical to the core values of journalism — honesty, integrity, transparency, democracy, and the general pursuit of the truth.
But it’s 2022 now, not 2015. We’re far enough removed from the dawn of the Trump era that we should be able to see whether newsrooms’ efforts to cater to far-right conservatives have bore fruit, in the form of greater Republican trust in the mainstream media.
The answer, according to any number of public opinion surveys, is an emphatic “no.” Here’s what the data show: