Trust in American media is at an all time low, dropping to 28 percent October 2025. Many prominent news outlets are asking the same question: How do we get Americans to trust our reporting again?
The New York Times has been at the forefront of this discussion and hosted a panel discussion on “Truth and the 2026 Election” on Tuesday at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The event was moderated by Patrick Healy, the Times’s assistant managing editor overseeing trust and standards, and the panel included New York Times’s White House correspondent Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Chicago bureau chief Julie Bosman.
A constant theme throughout the conversation was that trust in the media starts by listening to readers. It is important “to engage with readers directly about their questions and not just say, we’re in an ivory tower and we’re going to let the journalism speak for itself,” Healy said. “It’s about fact-based journalism. You count on us to go to places around the country, around the world, confirm and verify facts, and bring that to you without spin, without an agenda.”
Even as the media tries to stick with fact-based, unbiased journalism, skepticism among readers still arises. “I actually think skepticism is a good thing when you’re reading the news,” Kanno-Youngs said. “I don’t see that as a knock or something we would push back against… Hopefully that then results in a reader engaging with me.”
There was a clear consensus among the panel that they enjoyed when readers pushed back on an article, as long as the criticism is constructive. “When people come to us with feedback and it’s the most racist, sexist, antisemitic, islamophobic, vulgar, it’s just, what point are you making,” Healy said. “And the reality is if they have an actual point, good faith, maybe it’s even bad faith, but they want to make a point, we are usually open to it.”
Independence was also a major topic throughout the question. “Our north star is the idea of independence, independent journalism that nobody’s going to tell us what to write, whether it’s President Trump, President Biden, whoever’s in charge,” Healy said. He was referring to the criticism left-leaning news networks faced after the 2024 election as many Americans perceived they were not reporting enough on former President Joe Biden’s deterioration in office.
The handful of reporters who were writing about President Biden’s age and health, like New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, were subsequently ostracized by many within the Democratic establishment until it became clear Biden wouldn’t be able to run again. “I have to say, [of] the anger I have received and heard from the White House press offices, the greatest in my time has been from the Biden White House press office,” Healy said. “Just enormous anger at the times for asking these questions. Whether it was the withdrawal from Afghanistan or some [of] the congressional legislation, but especially around health and age and a sense we were holding him to a double standard.”
The conversation then turned towards the news coverage of the Wisconsin governor’s race and how the media portrayed Francesca Hong, the democratic socialist candidate who narrowly lost the Democratic primary in August. A few weeks before the primary, Hong’s past social media tweets, especially one where she called for the canceling of Thanksgiving, became a major point of contention within the media and questions arose about how it should be covered.
“I think that the way we wrote about it in the end was… we just rooted it in, does this matter to voters, “ Julie Bosman said. “And very often people were like… the Thanksgiving thing is a little off.” Healy then brought up the criticism that the news was focusing far too much attention on past questionable comments and not enough about issues that affect voters, such as affordability.
“I think it’s a very case by case basis,” Bosman said. “I often land on the idea that if our readers are hearing about something on CNN or reading about it on Twitter or wherever they get news, … you know, we should be writing about what people are talking about.” There was a consensus among the panel that they would much rather have readers learn about something while reading a news article which gives context to a given situation instead of seeing it on social media with little context.
There was also an emphasis in the conversation on how the New York Times has covered the second Trump administration and more broadly about how the media interacts with the administration. “I just think there are plenty of people calling the president names,” Kanno-Youngs said. “Especially in this day and age of where the White House can pick, more than in previous administrations, which reports go into the Oval Office, which reporters will be in the press conferences. I feel like I have more impact by asking a question that can result in an answer that people then can go use.”
This sentiment was also shared by Healy when discussing how some New York Times readers wanted reporters to push back against President Trump more. “Some of our readers want us to go into the Oval Office and just speak truth to power,” he said. “Just give speeches, get in his face, call him adjectives, or adverbs that would make some of our readers feel good. That is not our role. Our job is to ask questions.”
