Why Nobody Trusts the News — And How to Fix It

It's this great paradox. There's more good, high-quality information available to any of us than ever before. There's also more crap, misinformation, manipulative information available to all of us than ever before. So it puts a huge burden on us, the individual news consumer, to know what we're getting, what we're sharing, what we're taking serious, and what we're not. And I think that's too much for probably 95% of the population.

I think the origin of Politico is, in some ways, poetic, in some ways kind of the beginning of the end of an era, right? So if you go back 20 years ago, it's early 2007 is when Politico launched. Before that, I had been a political writer and the White House correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post. Never fancied myself an entrepreneur. We had this idea, we kind of saw that the web was changing the world. We wanted to be part of the change and not be part of the institution. So we launched Politico. Almost to the day that we launched Politico, the iPhone comes out, Facebook starts to take off, Twitter starts to take off, Google's surging, streaming takes off. So like 2007 is a really important year in history now looking back. And so we were able to ride what was a massive technological shift, a massive consumer shift. We probably pioneered kind of speed and voice in journalism.

Politico was a rocket ship. I mean, I think at four months after we launched the company, I was on stage co-moderating a presidential debate that we co-sponsored. Unheard of for a new media company. It was the Obama-Clinton race. So there was a lot of national, international interest in it, and the company never stopped growing. It to this day does quite well. In the time we were journalists with an idea, and then we were entrepreneurs that made it happen, and then you have to actually run a company, and that's where I learned to be a CEO, learned to lead. Eventually we started Axios. We had a great 10-year run. That company grew, we learned how to run a business, we proved that the digital model could work. I think we created a model that others not long after would try to copy in other areas: The Information in technology, now Punchbowl up on Capitol Hill. I think most of the successful publications of the last decade kind of took that model, and a lot of those folks worked for us. So it's very, very gratifying to see the family tree extend.

And then, you know, we did that 10 years and we had a great run. I'd say after 10 years, the issue that we had with information consumption was, we were like, wow, politics is important. It's not everything. And if you're a smart person, our observation was you're going to suddenly need to know a lot more across more topics when more stuff's getting pumped into your head. And we wanted to solve for that. And that's where we came up with the idea of Axios and came up with this idea of smart brevity, which is: what is the most efficient way to deliver smart content to busy professional readers? The architecture was smart brevity. This idea of what is new, why does it matter? Put your most important information in bullets. Make sure it's in hierarchical order. Make sure it's reader-first. It's all about the consumer, not what the journalist wants. And that model for that moment really worked. And Axios is now almost 10 years old.

Interestingly, almost on the exact same day in January of next year, Politico will turn 20, Axios will turn 10. And so I'm sure there'll be a lot of reflection on what that means in digital media in DC. But it really has been a tour of the wild west in terms of just the changing nature of the information ecosystem. Remember, before that, when I'm at the Washington Post, it's, you know, newspapers are dominant, a couple TV stations are dominant, most people trusted media. And now, like, I don't even know how I would describe the media ecosystem. Media matters, but does it matter more than podcasts? Does it matter more than influencers? Does it matter more than what's on your social media feed? Does it matter more than what you're watching on YouTube? Does it matter more than what you're hearing from people in your household? Like, the way that our brains absorb information is so radically different today than 20 years ago that it might as well be a 200-year gap.

I think they understood that something big was happening because you could see it. You had websites and you could look at your traffic and you could tell more people were coming to you online than they were coming to the newspaper. But they weren't adjusting. The Washington Post was still a newspaper. Reporters cared what was on the front page of the physical newspaper. I remember when I was at the Washington Post, the website and newspaper were two separate companies, one in Virginia, one in DC. When I went to the digital version in Virginia, they're like, 'You're the first person from the mothership who's ever come to our foreign land.' And I'm like, 'Are you kidding me? It looks like I get more people reading me on your site than I do in the newspaper.' They're like, 'Yes, we've been telling people that for a year. No one's listening.' So when we launched back then, people didn't. Now everybody starts a media company or starts a Substack. Back then nobody did. So everyone assumed we were on drugs and that it would fail. And so it was not an environment where people were cheering for us. I think people thought we'd fail. And just, it was such an exotic concept. To be honest, I kind of thought we'd fail. I just didn't care because I was a pretty good journalist. I figured someone would hire me. But you know, now, not that it took years before other people sort of had the confidence to do the same, but now it's very commonplace to happen.

And again, there's pros and cons of all this. I actually think that the information ecosystem is much better today than it was 20 years ago. I just think it's a really hard information ecosystem to navigate. It's this great paradox. There's more good, high-quality information available to any of us than ever before. There's also more crap, misinformation, manipulative information available to all of us than ever before. So it puts a huge burden on us, the individual news consumer, to know what we're getting, what we're sharing, what we're taking serious, and what we're not. And I think that's too much for probably 95% of the population.

I'm very sympathetic to the consumer because the answer is most likely you shouldn't be trusting most of what is popping up in your algorithm unless you're very carefully curating your algorithm. Unless you're really making sure you're following smart people and really following people that are on the level, that they're even people to begin with. Like half the people, quote-unquote, out there are bots. Very dangerous atmosphere. And so the way I look at it is, and I'm a beneficiary of this, and again, I think I'm in a small minority, I feel exponentially smarter today than I did five years ago. I feel like I have almost a bionic brain because I know what inputs to put in and what to filter out. So I know who to follow on X. I know what videos to watch. I know what podcasts are loaded with smart people. I know how to track down the smartest people across science, energy, technology when they're on shows and listen to them unfiltered. I know what news sources because I've been in the news. I know which reporters to follow and usually get it right. I know which ones kind of are commodity peddlers. And so I feel great. But I'm also in the news. I get paid to know the news. I've hired or fired a lot of these people over the years. So like I have 100 advantages. So for most people, you don't have that. So I think most people end up in the state that they probably would express, which is they feel overwhelmed, uncertain, deeply confused, and often a little demoralized. And just the simple fact, the thing that even five years ago it would be very unusual for a smart person to send you something and say, 'This is great if it's real.' Like no one would have said that. And now it happens every day.

I fall for it all the time where I'll see something and like I have a dopamine jolt. I'm like, 'Oh, this is interesting.' And I have to pause like, 'Wow, that's not even real.' And that's just a wild place to be in. And that's even before we really start to grapple with AI, which I'm sure we'll get to. But it's just an interesting time to be alive because I think about this all the time. Because people are usually critical of the modern information ecosystem. But then I think about it like 20 years ago. Like I went through this phase, and I've kind of gotten over it, of being obsessed with longevity and the science around it. Well, 20 years ago, if I opened the New York Times or the Washington Post or watched CBS, I might get a health story once every two weeks. Like it'd be very hard for me to learn. And I might have had to go to the library to get a medical journal. And now I can listen to the smartest people on earth who are studying these topics unfiltered on YouTube or on a podcast and have unfettered access to them that I wouldn't even have had as a reporter. So I can access the brightest minds and the most interesting information. And so that's great, but it just requires time and it requires a filter and it requires a pretty good BS sniffer. And that's a lot to ask of the average person who has a life.

I mean, Axios is killing it as a business, and obviously that's good because I run the business. But there's a part of it, not that it's not good, but it speaks to a real problem. And it's a problem I don't think people pay enough attention to, which is we get obsessed with income inequality, which is real and understandable why people get worked up about it. I worry a lot more about information inequality. Axios does so well because we serve the most powerful people in media, business, technology, politics. They read us voraciously, so we can charge a massive premium on our advertising because they're a hard audience to reach. And so as a business, we're doing really well in that space of, you know, writing for people who have a need for high-end information to do their job is a very good space right now. That is a very good space to be in. So if you're a Bloomberg or you're an Axios or you're a Punchbowl, even individual podcasts, right, in your family of podcasts, we're all doing great. It's like that is a really good time to be a media operator this year.

That doesn't necessarily solve the economics of informing everybody else, right? Like a lot of people can get our content for free. So in theory, you could get it on Instagram or you could get it in your Facebook feed, but most of those people are consuming passively. So unless they've decided to follow us and we get sort of tucked into their feed, they're not necessarily benefiting from what I think is an exceptionally high-quality, thoughtful journalism distilled in a way that would make sense to almost anybody. So I think about this question a lot because obviously I want to run a successful media company. I think media is the coolest industry to be in. You know, we get paid to learn and to talk to the most interesting people about the most interesting topics. But if you don't fundamentally have, you don't have to have highly informed, but you have to have an informed and somewhat trusting population for capitalism and markets and democracy to work long term, right? If you end up with like information anarchy, you probably end up with some form of anarchy, or if not anarchy, maybe you end up with information apathy and then you end up with population-wide apathy.

I always tell people who are dogging the media, kind of I have the same reaction when you dog capitalism or free markets or democracy. Like whatever our forefathers did 250 years ago, those guys were wizards, man. Wizards. They have set in motion the most powerful economic force known to man. And there's something about free markets, there's something about capitalism that creates almost this insatiable desire to create, which then leads you to things like drug discovery and the internet. But I also think media, like this idea of embedding into the Constitution this freedom of press, freedom of information, is also somewhat unique to the US, and I think really helps the system work because it allows for this sort of level of transparency and accountability that you obviously lose in other systems. And so it's the mixture of those. You stir those things together and you get what I consider to be like true American magic. Like people don't always feel it these days. They're kind of down on things. I think that's nuts. I actually think it's a great time to be alive. I think it's an amazing time to be an American. I think that the system, for all the crappy leadership that we often have, it's somehow resilient and powerful and it's like bigger than us.

A huge, huge... I mean, because like listen, it's big. Like we could spend hours debating who's to blame for it, but it's real. Like I'm just such a brutalist when it comes to, it's just real. Like whatever, I can't change it. I've looked at every poll. People don't trust us. So they don't trust us. And I do think that there's a lot of culpability in the way that the media carried itself over the last 15 years that I wish others in the media would take more responsibility for. I also think there's been a very organized movement, particularly on the right, to discredit mainstream media, and it's been very, very successful. So by the time we started Axios, that was at full boil. Like distrust was boiling. It was raging. And so we did a couple of things. Not that we're going to cure the problem, but at least for our specific audience, we wanted to. And we said, 'We're not going to have an opinion page. There's enough noise out there. We probably could have driven a lot of traffic and made some money off of it, but I don't think the world needs more opinion. It feels like we have a sufficient amount of that these days.' And then we did a harder thing, which is we asked everybody who works here to not talk about their political views in any public setting, even if you're not a reporter. And the reason that we've asked people to do that is like we're trying to be clinical with our reporting. We're trying to persuade the persuadables that we're on the level and that they can trust us. So we have almost a moral obligation to try to go the extra mile to see if we can win their trust by not doing things that undermine that trust. And I don't think the average person differentiates between an Axios reporter and an Axios marketer or an Axios salesperson popping off on Twitter or popping off on LinkedIn. And so people have been very admirable in living up to that. And so it was very much in our minds.

It always is. Like I hate it that people don't trust the media. I love good journalism. And I think there's some great media companies out there that I wish people did more fully trust. And that doesn't mean we don't get stuff wrong. Axios has gotten things wrong. When you get it wrong, you got to admit it and be transparent about it. Be humble enough to admit you're not always going to get it right. If you're wrong, like say it. And people are very understanding if you're not trying to BS them. That I think is definitely true. And so again, I think media behaves a little bit better now than it did 10 years ago. You know, I think when the history of media unpopularity is written, I think Twitter is going to play a huge role in it. It was the first time that I, as somebody who worked in a lot of these newsrooms and knows a lot of these people, there was something about Twitter that prompted otherwise serious journalists to start to really reveal their personal views in a way that I think discredited them with a lot of readers, and I didn't think that was very healthy. I was very critical of it at the time. I remain quite critical of it. And again, because what people miss, the critics of journalism, like I've sat, again, like I was at the Journal, I was at the Post, at Politico here, like the number of times that a serious reporter shows overt signs of bias, in my experience as somebody who's kind of attuned to it, I don't see it very often. Most of the bias that I would see in newsrooms came from ignorance of their background, right? Like most of the journalists came from Ivy Leagues, bigger cities, you know, kind of lefty families. And so they weren't churchgoers. They weren't hunters. They weren't from the Midwest. Like I happen to be a, you know, Midwest kid who went to church and hunts. And so I had a little bit maybe a different perspective coming in than others. But that's usually where I saw it. Most reporters, I think most people, if they watched most reporters in action, would be, they'd be pretty proud of how hard they do try to get to the closest approximation of the truth, imperfectly for sure, but I think they do a better job than I think our brand media would suggest.

I agree with you that it's been blurred considerably. I do personally have a big distinction in my mind. I think there's one thing for someone like Scott Galloway to be a hyper-informed person who has multiple platforms, does talk to some people, but like obviously has a point of view and he's very, very clear about his point of view. And I think that's great. I know exactly where he's coming from. I listen to him for that very reason and I can kind of filter his opinion through that. That's different than if you sign up to be a reporter, right? Like when we're hiring a reporter, what I'm not saying you don't have biases. We're all human, so you have biases. But what we ask people to do is to say, 'Listen, you're coming here. You got to check whatever biases you have kind of at the door the best that you can. And you have to cover these things like a doctor, clinically, and you're not here to make an argument. You're here to illuminate.' And that's just different. It's different. And both serve a great value. It'd be very hard for Scott to be Scott if there wasn't a lot of reporting that he could draw from. So I think both are really important. And I think as long as you're clear about what you are, and then I think for people who have consciously made the decision to come to you, they understand that. They know if they come to Axios and they're reading Sarah Frier, they're getting something distinct from the experience of watching Scott or watching Kara. Like two very different things, two companies with different business models that have very clearly defined brands, and those brands stand for something in the mind of that person. So I think as long as you're clear with the consumer, the consumer's cool with it. I do think you need both.

Like this idea, I got into this weird whatever pissing match with Elon Musk for a day or two, maybe a couple years ago, about, I did this speech that wasn't meant to leak but it leaked, where I basically said, like Elon Musk who says like, 'We are the news, we are the news,' and I said, well, you're not the news, you're a platform where people are expressing themselves in small bursts of information, and you're a great platform, you're killing it, like you should be very proud of it. But you're not a reporter. Don't pretend that there's that set of standards that you're applying to it. And there is a difference. And I think there's a huge difference, which is I do think this idea of saying I'm going to try to get to the closest approximation of the truth, you trying to talk to people on every side of an issue, you writing it through that lens, it then going through an editing process is imperfect for sure. But I still think it is the best process that I know of for trying to get to a clinical truth that people can then make decisions or have arguments about. Right? So it's not, again, it is flawed, but everything's flawed.