MSNBC anchor Katy Tur appeared to say the quiet part out loud as she questioned the moral ethics of her own profession while live on air.
The surprising admission came late last week while Tur was interviewing with The Hill’s Niall Stanage to promote her new memoire. During the interview, Stanage asked Tur why she almost quit journalism during the pandemic and how she feels about the industry as a whole.
“It’s something that I don’t have a concrete answer to, and that’s not because I don’t love journalism, I do, it’s just convergence of two issues,” Tur mused.
“One of them being that we cover very dark stuff, in succession, and it seems like its getting darker and darker and it can be hard on your mental health,” Tur added, referencing the mental toll of reporting mass shootings, political unrest, and other tragedies.
She then brought up a recent Gallup poll about the public’s view on journalism that seemed to spark something deep within the famed reporter. “It can be a bit demoralizing, and then on top of that, there was just a Gallup poll out today that shows that the trusts in media – newspapers and television – is hitting an all-time low.”
That’s when she dropped the real bombshell of the interview, questioning the morality of modern journalism and her role in it as a whole.
“People don’t trust us,” Tur declared. “They don’t believe us, and it makes me wonder if this job, as I am currently doing it, is effective, but if it’s doing more harm than good,” Tur said. “I don’t have a good answer for that, though, those thoughts linger in the back of my mind. They linger though because I do love it and I think it’s important and I’m hoping to find a way to better communicate with people.”
The Gallup poll that Tur was talking about showed that only 16% of the general public have a “great deal or quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers, the lowest number since 1973. Even more shocking was the mere 11% of Americans who show the same level of confidence in television news programs like Tur’s.
With the breakneck pace of television news and its general partisanship, it’s no surprise that the public is turning on these celebrity reporters. On a scale from 1 to 10 with 1 being the least, how much do you trust the mainstream media in 2022?
