COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW – 06/03/2019
Michael Schudson
Is too much made of the mistrust of journalists?
It is the alarm of our moment, and one gets the sense that the pitch of anti-press sentiment is now the most fevered it’s been since the founding of the republic. In fact, presidents from George Washington on, including Thomas Jefferson (whose statue stands outside the Columbia Journalism School, where I work), judged newspapers to be full of lies. Editors didn’t have much regard for their own kind, sometimes challenging one another to duels. And there is a history of popular violence against the media, notably against abolitionist newspapers before the Civil War and against Black journalists and institutions at various points thereafter—a matter not of distrust but of hate and fear.