If a restaurant lost more than 80% of its employees while trying to serve an ever-growing number of potential customers, no one would wonder why quality plummeted.
But when it comes to the news media, few see the problem so clearly.
Surveys by the Reuters Institute and the Gallup/Knight Foundation found bias was the leading reason Americans distrusted the news media, with around 80% seeing it. Sensationalism and declining standards for accuracy and context in the rush to be first also came up.
Staffing levels did not.
Gallup’s latest polling on Americans’ trust in news media showed a small bump from a record-low 28% last year to 33%. That’s still less than half of the roughly 70% of Americans who trusted the media in the 1970s.
This year’s bump came almost entirely from Republicans, whose confidence rose from 8% to 22%. Still, in 1973, when far more journalists were working, Gallup found 74% of Democrats and 68% of Republicans trusted the media.
Back then, there were about 37 full-time reporters and editors for every 100,000 Americans. The Local Journalist Index puts the number of local journalists at about 40 per 100,000 in 2002 and 7.8 today, an 81% drop.
I spent 16 years in television news and saw these issues firsthand. From 2003 to 2022, Pew says local stations increased their TV news programming by about 80%. They also added web and social media duties but kept staffing flat. The same number of people had to produce far more content, and quality suffered.
Newspaper revenue was gutted in the late ’90s and early 2000s as Craigslist dominated the classified ad market and internet giants Google and later Meta took much of the rest.
Local TV news sustained itself largely through pharmaceutical and political ads and retransmission fees from cable and satellite companies. But cord-cutting, an aging audience and a shift to streaming services have sharply reduced broadcasting revenue in recent years, with layoffs and local news department closures on the rise.
Quality journalism is not cheap. Investigative reporting alone requires research, public records requests, legal review, logging footage, hours of shooting and editing, sometimes for stories the public never sees.
Opinion pieces are inexpensive and easy to produce, requiring little more than a hot take or a couple of pundits arguing to fill time.
Cut 80% of local reporters, and the coverage goes with them. People can tell.
The audience losses are stark: Newspaper circulation has nosedived by roughly 65% to 70% since its peak in the ’70s and ’80s; prime-time local TV news ratings, already comparatively low, dropped by more than 40% from 2016 to 2022 alone, according to Pew.
Combined traffic to the 50 largest U.S. news sites fell from 4.9 billion visits in July 2024 to 3.1 billion this July, according to a Similarweb data analysis by Press Gazette.
Job cuts are also accelerating.
U.S. newspaper publishing employment has collapsed by 82% since 1990. Between 2022 and 2025, more than one in 10 editors and reporters in the U.S. were laid off.
So far this year, over 1,900 broadcast, digital and print journalism employees have lost their jobs, up 9% from the first nine months of 2025, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
The workers left standing, already stretched thin, report widespread burnout, overwhelming workloads and gaps in accountability journalism and basic city hall coverage throughout the U.S.
Audiences want objective reporting, not more “takes,” whether they show up on YouTube, in a newspaper, on a blog or on CNN.
If the industry wants its audience back, it needs to start hiring journalists again.
Last Updated on October 4, 2026 by Joe Douglass
