American trust in traditional media is at an all-time low. As public support for mainstream journalism has fallen from 72 percent in 1976 to just 31 percent in 2024, major news organizations face shrinking audiences, falling profit margins, and declining recruitment numbers. While the future of journalism remains uncertain, The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker holds hope that the next generation of journalists can learn from the industry’s mistakes and regroup.
During a press conference hosted by the Fund for American Studies, Gerard Baker addressed journalism’s current credibility crisis and assessed how future journalists must restore journalism’s traditional values to reverse its decline. To rebuild media reliability, Mr. Baker warns to resist the monetary incentives of extremism and place objectivity before attention-seeking partisanship.
Now the Editor-at-large of The Wall Street Journal, Gerard Baker has forged a storied thirty-year career as a columnist, reporter, and television interviewer. After transitioning out of a financial role at the Bank of England, Mr. Baker found himself in British television for the British Broadcasting Corporation. He then began writing for the Financial Times before moving to The Wall Street Journal, where Mr. Baker served as Editor-in-chief (EIC) from 2013 to 2018, hosted “WSJ at Large with Gerry Baker” on Fox Business, and moderated the fourth 2016 Republican primary debate. As EIC, Mr. Baker is credited with guiding The Wall Street Journal into the social media age while preserving much of the institutional reputation and viewer circulation that industry counterparts have lost. He has since stepped back as Editor-at-Large to run his opinion column and podcast series, “Free Expression.”
Throughout his tenure, Gerard Baker noticed the signs of an industry in decline. As Editor-in-Chief, Mr. Baker weathered the same macroeconomic trends that led news organizations to embrace partisan reporting. When asked to name the chief factor behind the decline of public trust in media, Mr. Baker admonished the muddling of news reporting and opinion. Mr. Baker pointed to an industry-wide shift in revenue collection as the root cause. Before the rise of the internet, the most reliable revenue streams came from advertisers. The primary goal of sponsors was to have their advertisements seen by a large audience, with little care shown for anything else displayed on the page. Therefore, advertising revenue normally came without censoring strings attached, allowing journalists to make money without compromising their objectivity.
However, Mr. Baker describes the rise of the internet as an “extinction-level event” for news organizations. “When the digital age came along, that advertising went to digital rivals much bigger… [to] digital rivals like Google, and then social media like Facebook.” Advertising revenue, which once made up a “bulk of The Wall Street Journal’s revenue,” declined by “80 percent over the [last] ten years,” forcing it to seek other strategies. The WSJ was not alone. From 2013 to 2022, total ad revenue for publicly traded newspaper companies fell by over 50 percent. As social media continues to draw larger and larger user bases, advertisers have continued to shift their campaigns online, away from legacy media.
The end of the advertiser era introduced the start of the subscription era, as news organizations asked their readers to cover the bill. This introduced a new problem for legacy media, which now had to build and preserve a paying audience large enough to cover their costs of business. “When we came to rely on subscriptions, we had to sell the product… directly to the people. We had to persuade them to part with $300, $400 a year to buy a subscription to The Wall Street Journal.”
In order to cultivate a dedicated audience, news organizations shifted to more partisan and eye-catching, controversial publications. “News organizations… while they were claiming objectivity, were increasingly presenting the news in a filtered way… heavily biased in one particular direction.” Mr. Baker similarly laments the industry-wide trend towards stirring highly partisan controversy, which he calls “the easiest way to get attention.” According to Mr. Baker, the modern industry model now rewards sensationalism and outrage over neutrality and rationality.
With fairness once the guiding principle of all news organizations, different outlets stretched to cover different political niches. “If you’re a subscriber to The New York Times, you didn’t want to read that Donald Trump was saving the country or doing a great job. You wanted to read that Donald Trump was the reincarnation of Satan.” This reinforced different journals into different camps, pressuring them to stay consistent with their chosen political message to placate their paying subscribers. Americans became less interested in having their pre-existing views challenged, and so favored sources that could consistently validate their ideologies.
Gerard Baker argues that, as traditional news organizations became less and less objective, Americans lost more and more trust in legacy media outlets. Mr. Baker believes that this mistrust buoyed the rise of alternative news sources, like podcasts and social media pundits, many of which, he states, “don’t play by journalism rules.”
Ultimately, these pressures have motivated a steep decline in the journalism industry. Gerard Baker still has hope for its next generation.
Mr. Baker believes that journalism’s decline will reverse because it has recovered from similar circumstances before, pointing to the partisan past of the United States as proof. The “very partisan news in the early days of the Republic” reflected the chaotic environment of America’s fledgling politics. In fact, newspapers remained politically charged until the early 20th century. Partisan papers only adopted objectivity as a journalistic standard in 1920 after a large industry shakeup led to several mergers and organizational shutdowns, leading surviving outlets to broaden their audiences. Mr. Baker says the future of journalism must once again return to its objectivity principle to give the people what they crave: “Honesty in reporting.”
Mr. Baker offers clear advice to student journalists hoping to enter the field. “I’m excited about smart, brilliant people like yourselves… to restore trust in much of our media.” In order to restore trust, Mr. Baker claims new journalists must preserve the “importance of facts” through a rigorous commitment to the common good. Even though he admits the writing process can be frustrating, Mr. Baker argues journalists must “take the reporting process seriously” because “it’s the right thing to do.”
When writing opinion pieces, instead of preserving ideological echo chambers or chasing clicks, Mr. Baker advises students to “argue [their] opinion in a way that is intelligent… based in facts.” If these arguments are based on humility and openness, they may “win over people—even people who disagree with you.”
On conducting interviews, Mr. Baker pulls from his experience to encourage students to remain firm, but fair, to interviewees. Having interviewed bankers and ministers, pundits and presidents, Mr. Baker advises interviewers to adapt their style to fit the personality type of their interviewee and the subject at hand. “Sometimes kid gloves can actually coax out of a reluctant interviewee more interesting answers you would get by confronting them hard.”
“I’ve interviewed every President [except Joe Biden] since Bill Clinton, and… [gentler] interviews often will yield more rather than an interview which is controversial and hostile.”
Gerard Baker
While Mr. Baker recognizes that confrontational interviews have a time and place, he acknowledges they can create an image of bias or agenda setting among audiences, furthering alienation and polarization. However, Mr. Baker warns not to “flatter” interviewees, which he likens to “auditioning for a job… rather than asking tough questions.” He describes the ultimate purpose of interviews as being to hold public figures accountable to the wider population, and interviewers must not avoid asking tough questions that an American audience wishes to have answered. In order to conduct a balanced interview, journalists must remain tough but fair with their subjects and preserve an objective line of questioning.
While remaining objective as a journalist sounds simple enough, Mr. Baker describes the challenging temptations aspiring journalists must avoid to remain credible. He advises students to avoid the pitfalls of virality, which can offer fame and attention at the cost of journalistic standards. If the industry is to reject the sensationalism of the modern era and restore easily accessible truth to the American public, Gerard Baker believes that the next generation of journalists will be the ones to make the change.
“The future of journalism depends on your generation,” Mr. Baker told his student interviewers. By fighting for objectivity, and against sensationalism, Gerard Baker believes legacy media can find its way back into the hearts of disenchanted Americans.
