Undermining the Fourth Estate: Elite Criticism and Journalism's Fragile Foundation

Abstract

American democracy is predicated on having a public that is sufficiently informed to hold elected officials accountable and to make sensible decisions at the voting booth. But a decades-long decline in Americans’ trust in the press threatens to undermine the fundamental role the media plays in cultivating an informed populace. This dissertation asks: What explains Americans’ declining trust in the press? I address this question in three parts. In Part I, I examine the historical development of journalism as a profession to offer a theory for why American journalism’s institutional forms make it uniquely vulnerable to political efforts to undermine its legitimacy. In Part II, I quantify congressional rhetoric about the press between 1939 and 2023 and relate it to long-standing survey evidence to show that elite press criticism has driven down Americans’ trust in the media over the last half-century. Finally, in Part III, I turn from causes of Americans’ declining trust in the media to consequences and possible solutions. I examine the effects of media trust and elite press criticism on news consumption using web-browsing and newspaper circulation data, and I conduct a trio of original survey experiments to assess interventions aimed at restoring trust in reputable journalism. I conclude with reflections of the state of American media and American democracy – and how those two are fundamentally intertwined.