Poynter’s Jon Greenberg remembers watching news reporters during the Vietnam War on television as a 12-year-old kid.
"We're eating dinner and we're watching Walter Cronkite, and I distinctly remember that. It was just the routine," Greenberg said.
His family was a CBS family, but ABC and NBC also had strong audiences, with millions of Americans tuning in each night to watch the news. Greenberg said back then, when there were only three networks for viewers to choose from for their news, they had to appeal to a broader market, and with a vaguer political consensus.
"Because they had such a broad reach, they actually represented a fairly neutral centrist ground, because they couldn't afford to irritate and alienate the people in Iowa, from the people in New York, from the people in Georgia, etc.," he said.
Since then, trust in the government and the media have fallen drastically. In a 2025 poll from Pew, only 17% of Americans said they trust the government to do what is right. Additionally, another 2025 poll, this one from Gallup, found just 28% of Americans have trust in mass media, whereas in the 1970s, nearly 70% of Americans had confidence in newspapers, TV and radio to report the news fairly and accurately.
Johanna Dunaway, research director at the Syracuse University Institute for Democracy, said several shifts happened during the Obama administration that have led to these low levels of trust in news media. One was growing dislike and mistrust for people across the political aisle. At the same time, cable news networks started putting more slant in their coverage. There’s a reason for that change too.
According to Dunaway, the majority of the public is too busy to consume news or is actively avoiding it, either because they’re fatigued by the news cycle or/and they feel it doesn't serve them. Those who do tune in? They’re a more specific type of audience.
It really is the case that people, behaviorally, do actually click more, stay on the page longer, look at the screen longer, if they see that conflict, dissension, argumentation.Johanna Dunaway
"It's really more the super-interested people that really enjoy media and politics and news as almost a pastime. They're super passionate, and they tend to be more extreme and more partisan, so they ... kind of like the slant and bias when it's in their direction," Dunaway said.
And, even though people report they want particular news from the media, what they actually give their attention to is different.
"Audience members say that they don't really like the partisan conflict, or they don't like the two parties dominating everything, or they don't like negative ads or things like that," she said. But, "It really is the case that people, behaviorally, do actually click more, stay on the page longer, look at the screen longer, if they see that conflict, dissension, argumentation."
Hear more on Unsettled: Media echo chambers create competing realities
The emergence of social media as a venue for consuming news also means people are consuming things through a personalized algorithm, rather than mass media appealing to people across the political spectrum. While news networks used to have an incentive to be politically balanced to avoid offending a variety of viewers, Alexandros Efstratiou, from the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, said that it’s the reverse online — it's actually agitating content that gets rewarded with more attention.
"One very consistent thing we tend to find on social media is that there is a price to bipartisanship," Efstratiou said. "If you try and kind of straddle that line, you're just not going to get engagement."
There isn't an incentive for content creators to take a balanced approach, because polarization is good for optimizing engagement.
"The polarization arises just simply out of how engagement is being optimized. There are no real guardrails against that," Efstratiou said. "There is absolutely no motivation or incentive for any kind of content creator to just kind of reel it down at the moment and try a bit more of a balanced approach.”
Dunaway said the impact of this muddied media environment is the loss of a shared space for people to understand what’s actually happening in politics.
"You've got sets of people talking past each other in a way that seems really prohibitive for good government. I think that's a huge part of the issue that we're facing today."
To hear this conversation listen to Unsettled, hosted by Charity Nebbe. Caitlin Troutman produced this episode.
