The Yale Political Union hosted former Editor in Chief of the Wall Street Journal, Gerard Baker, and left-wing political commentator, Molly Jong-Fast, to debate whether journalists are to blame for Americans’ distrust of the media.
Gerard Baker (left) and Molly Jong-Fast (right) address the YPU. (Credit: Sygne Stole)
Lucas Miller
Investigative Reporting Editor, The Buckley Beacon
On Tuesday, the Yale Political Union hosted Wall Street Journal Editor at Large Gerard Baker and novelist turned political commentator Molly Jong-Fast to 53 Wall Street to debate the resolution “Resolved: Journalists Are to Blame for the Loss of Public Trust.”
Baker has spent more than thirty years in journalism, including five years as the Editor in Chief of the Wall Street Journal from 2013 to 2018. Baker was previously the deputy editor of WSJ from 2008-2013. Today, Baker writes a weekly column for the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page on politics, economics, and culture. He also writes a column about global affairs every Friday for The Times of London.
Jong-Fast, the author of the New York Times bestseller How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir, has garnered nearly one million followers on her X account and is a political analyst on MS NOW, formerly MSNBC.
Providing the basis for debate is the phenomenon of Americans’ declining trust in mass media since the 1970s. A 2025 Gallup poll found that, in 1976, 72% of Americans reported having a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in the media. In 2000, that number was 51%. Today, it has fallen to a mere 28%.
Baker, beginning the night with his speech, contextualized the resolution and gave the philosophy for his affirmative argument. “Truth is the essential foundation of a functioning society,” Baker said. “It’s a lubricant of social interaction. But trust has to be earned, and repeatedly re-earned.”
Baker placed the blame for declining trust on media companies, some of which he believes are no longer committed to factual reporting. “Citizens must believe that news organizations are committed to telling them the truth. For a long time in this country, that was roughly how it worked. But sadly, Mr. Speaker, today, it’s no longer the case,” Baker argued.
In a bygone era, reporters and editors sought out the truth and told it regardless of where it led their listeners ideologically, Baker argued. Today, that version of the media industry is gone and has been replaced by a system that steers listeners toward a particular political persuasion. Rather than remain attached to facts, modern outlets instead “choose to propagate a particular ideological lie, to use their position to promote a political and cultural worldview,” Baker said in his speech.
The transition away from fact-based to ideologically-charged reporting traces back to the 1980s, when news became “increasingly partisan and ideological, again, from a principally left-wing perspective,” Baker claimed.
Baker argued that bias extends across sources and issues. “Through the 1990s and 2000s, the main vehicles—newspapers, TV news, news networks—promoted a one-sided view of the world, on everything from tax and spending to foreign policy, social questions like gun control, abortion, gender, and sexual identities.”
Baker also traced his argument through the history of journalism’s evolution. “Back in the 1950s and ‘60s, and earlier than that, journalism wasn’t seen as a profession; it seemed more of a craft. Most journalists did not go to expensive and distinguished universities like Yale. Most people didn’t have a particular ideological agenda,” he continued.
When a college degree became a prerequisite for participation in the media, Baker contested, the media shifted left. Baker argued it did so not because of indoctrination from the university system, but rather through a self-selection process. If journalists were required to hold college degrees and most college graduates were left-leaning, most journalists would share their political proclivities.
Anticipating a counterargument, Baker argued that conservative organizations, such as talk radio and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, came later because they were responses to distrust in journalism rather than root causes. “Again, let’s be clear, these are not the cause of declining media trust; they were the response to declining media trust,” he said.
Toward the end of his speech, Baker emphasized the importance of trust in the media. When Americans trust the media, they accept what is reported as factual rather than as opinion. When they do not, they quickly disbelieve what they hear. “What we have today is a bifurcated media. It is a world in which people are entitled to their own facts. They choose facts they want to believe and which accord with their own opinions. We no longer have agreed-upon facts. That is a disaster,” Baker proclaimed.
“This decline in trust has been genuinely catastrophic for American democracy. I don’t celebrate the loss of authority in these organizations because they are essential to our democracy,” Baker said.
Though his speech painted a pessimistic view of the modern media, in an exclusive interview with the Beacon, Baker presented a hopeful vision for the future. “I think a lot of media is changing, maybe in some good ways; to start, there are people starting to acknowledge the problem. A lot more change is necessary, but I think ultimately I’m an optimist.”
Jong-Fast spent her speech defending journalists, though she declined to attribute the lack of trust in modern media to another party. “I’m just saying that journalists are not responsible for the lack of public trust. I’m not telling you who is, I’m just telling you it’s not them,” she said.
She similarly grounded her argument in journalism’s history, but argued that newspapers today are “better looking, better organized, more responsible, less sensational, less sexist and racist, and more informative,” quoting a study by Carl Sessions Stepp that analyzed French newspapers in the 1960s and 1990s.
She also suggested that a positive change in journalism ultimately led to a decline in public distrust. “Papers in the 1960s seemed naïvely trusting of the government,” she said. “It may have been precisely this move away from deferential stenography and toward fearless investigation that led to a declining trust in the news media,” Jong-Fast continued, quoting a recent New York Times opinion by Lydia Polgreen.
Toward the end of her speech, Jong-Fast appeared to pin the blame on American readers. “What people do not like about the media is its implication, its implicit or explicit criticism, of their heroes or their home teams. No one, famously, likes the bearer of bad news.”
In a post-debate interview with the Beacon, Jong-Fast reacted positively to the debate, including to her opponent’s remarks. “They were great,” she said. “I mean, it’s just all undermined by the fact that he works for Rupert Murdoch.” The Wall Street Journal was acquired in 2007 by News Corp, which is controlled by the Murdoch family.
By the end of the debate, the crowd had thinned to fewer than fifty people. Speaking with the Beacon, Baker attributed the small crowd to general apathy toward journalism and a lack of public trust in it as an institution. “It’s an issue that’s declining in saliency,” he said. “People don’t really care about journalism anymore.”
The resolution ultimately failed by a vote of 16 to 23, with 3 abstentions.