Trust and the Economy: Journalists Getting It Wrong Edition

Jonathan Bernstein (guesting at Andrew Sullivan’s blog) complains about an AP piece on trust and politics.

there’s an annoying AP story this morning claiming that declining trust in government has something to do with…television. And yet, as political scientist Henry Farrell says, “When the economy is doing well, people trust government, they trust Congress and they trust a bunch of other institutions. When the economy’s doing badly, people’s faith tends to drop.’’ Unfortunately, after the AP quotes Farrell, the story then ignores him and returns to speculation about how damaging it is for people to see things like the health care summit, with its bickering and lack of immediate action, on TV.

Well, not so. Political scientist John Sides did a nice item on trust recently at The Monkey Cage, showing that trust in government fell steadily in the 1960s and early 1970s (no surprise, given Vietnam and Watergate) and since then—in fact, since the mid-1960s—trust in government basically follows the economy.

I’ll confess that I was pretty annoyed too. The piece by Liz Sidoti really didn’t reflect the conversation we had.

‘’When the economy is doing well, people trust government, they trust Congress and they trust a bunch of other institutions,’’ said Henry Farrell, a political science professor at George Washington University who has studied the issue. ‘’When the economy’s doing badly, people’s faith tends to drop.’’

But America’s trust in institutions started dropping long before this recession.

Analysts point to the 1960s and 1970s—with the counterculture, Vietnam, Watergate and the rise of the conservative movement—as the beginning of a several-decade slide. TV was in its heyday at the time, with nightly newscasts showing the imperfections of institutions, particularly government, more than ever before.

‘’Hand in hand, the rise of television also accompanied the rise in mistrust of institutions. That isn’t to say one caused the other, but they’re very much in a symbiotic relationship,’’ said Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University professor of television who studies popular culture.

The juxtaposition here strongly suggests to readers that I was simply arguing that the current decline in trust was a product of the recent recession, and that I didn’t say anything at all about historical trends. But not only did I make it quite clear that the relationship between trust and economic growth was one that had stretched over several decades, I emailed her a link to John’s post with a graph showing the relationship over time, telling her that this was where she should go for a detailed discussion. And she got the link too, suggested she had read it, and thanked me for it.

I don’t want to bag on her too much – she seemed both nice and genuinely intellectually curious on the phone. Still, the story – as it was printed – didn’t seem to really reflect the debate, or my summary of it. I can understand how the political science take on this makes for a poor journalistic story – it suggests that the debate about how trust is declining today is a non-issue. She doesn’t have to be convinced by this argument – perhaps she found the professor of television studies made a more compelling case. Also, perhaps, she doesn’t have the statistical training to understand what variance is etc – journalists come from a wide variety of educational backgrounds. But at the least she could have accurately reported what I said, and why I said it. Instead, she used a distorted version of my argument as a throwaway to set up her main argument about the evils of TV, the horrible things that are likely to result from declining trust, etc etc. I should also say that this is not an unique experience half the time when a journalist calls me, he or she already has a strong idea of what I ‘ought’ to say to make his or her precooked story work, and makes that emphatically clear either in the interview, or in how he or she uses my quotes in the story afterwards (or, more often, doesn’t use my quotes – I get the impression of an implicit political economy in which academics or experts who conform to the script get rewarded with media coverage).

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