Undermining the Fourth Estate: Elite Attacks on Media Credibility

Americans’ trust in the media has declined precipitously since the 1970s. To what extent has elite criticism driven this trend? In this paper, I apply advanced natural language processing tools to a corpus of 10.7 million congressional floor speeches to systematically measure elite rhetoric about the media over time. I then relate this measure to time-series public opinion data 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 trends in newspaper editorial bias. These results imply that politicians wield a powerful ability to affect public perceptions of their independent watchdogs.