David Beavers (APRW)

Speaker & Title

David Beavers, "Undermining the Fourth Estate: Elite Attacks on Media Credibility"

Abstract

Americans' trust in the media has declined precipitously since the 1970s, outpacing the decline in trust in other political institutions and the decline in media trust in other Western democracies. To what extent does elite criticism about the media drive this trend? In this paper, I apply advanced natural language processing tools to a corpus of more than 10.7 million floor speeches from the Congressional Record to systematically measure elite rhetoric about the media over time. I then relate this measure to time-series public opinion polls on media trust from Gallup and the General Social Survey. I find that congressional Republicans and Democrats both became more critical of the media between the 1960s and the 1990s and have polarized since. Republicans today are, on average, more negative about the media than at any time since 1939. Statistical results show that elite criticism predicts subsequent declines in copartisans' perceptions of journalists, accounting for individuals' generalized institutional trust and over-time trends in newspaper editorial bias. These results imply that politicians wield a powerful ability to affect public perceptions of their independent watchdogs, with potentially grave implications for democratic accountability.