Can the media shed its partisan reputation?

17-year-old Alicia Life was chatting with a customer in the restaurant she works at in Mechanicsville, West Virginia. It was closing time. During their small-talk, the customer asked a seemingly innocuous question: what do you want to be when you grow up?

“I said well, I want to be a journalist,” said Alicia. “And he said ‘Oh, are your articles going to be called Alicia’s Fake News?’”

I met Alicia at the 2017 Al Neuharth Free Spirit and Journalism Conference, a weeklong event at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. featuring one high school journalist from each state and some of the biggest names in journalism. At the conference I was able to ask representatives of prominent media organizations how they’re fighting to regain the diminishing faith in journalism, particularly amongst conservatives – a 2016 Gallup poll showed that only 32% of Americans and 14% of Republicans have a “great deal or fair amount of trust in the media” – so rudely expressed to Alicia at work that day.

The answers were not particularly inspiring.

“I think we need to try to win people back, absolutely,” said Washington Post editor-in-chief Marty Baron. “We have to do that with the work that we do and make sure it’s accurate, make sure that it’s fair, that we’ve done everything that we should to make sure its honest.”

            Others at the conference echoed Mr. Baron’s passive philosophy for building trust in journalism. “I don’t know if you’re ever going to convince [Americans who don’t trust the media] that the press is telling the truth,” said Jennifer Palmieri, communications director for the Obama White House and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. “But I think the best way to fight the fake news is with more awareness and more truth … It’s on the citizen to discern these things.”

In other words: the media just has to continue reporting real facts, and people will come around eventually. What reason is there to believe this will happen?

When Donald Trump was elected president, the press realized that the importance of its mission to make the truth known had increased tenfold. News organizations sounded the alarm bells – The Washington Post changed its header to “Democracy Dies in Darkness”; The New York Times marked the gravity of the moment with their first advertising campaign in a decade. “The truth is more important now than ever,” they warned in a half-minute Super Bowl spot.

Indeed it is. But to shine truth’s light in an age of misinformation and political dishonesty, mainstream media needs to make a priority of recapturing its credibility with the Americans who dismiss its work as “fake news.” Doing that will require more than fair and accurate reporting. To regain the right’s trust, the media needs to become more transparent and diversify its content.

With Americans increasingly getting their news from national organizations rather than local outlets, there is a disconnect between the consumers and providers of information. Twenty years ago you might have run into your prep sports reporter at the supermarket or lived in the same neighborhood as your weekly columnist. But to a reader of a national publication today, journalists are faceless names stationed in faraway metropolises. Not knowing who the people behind the news are or how they operate makes it easier to assume bias.

This is where greater transparency could help. “Something we did in the past that we need to come back to is opening up our editorial meetings,” said Val Hoeppner, a Nashville-based digital media expert. “Live-stream it. Use technology to let people to come in and see your process because I think people think we sit around and say, ‘How can we make Trump look bad today?’ And that’s not the truth.”

Providing behind-the-scenes access to consumers would bring the media closer to disaffected citizens. But ultimately, the only sure way for legitimate media outlets to win customers is to produce content that interests them. The most important step the press can take towards credibility on the right is telling more stories that appeal to conservative cultural and political sensibilities.

Culturally speaking, the media needs to cover rural communities and middle America with greater attention. “We journalists need to get out of our own silos – which are primarily urban – and start listening to those parts of the country that felt ignored until Donald Trump came along and lit a fire under their smoldering resentment,” wrote Judy Muller, an Emmy-winning TV reporter and professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Southern California, in a Telluride Magazine op-ed.

The media’s failure to detect the rise of Donald Trump opened the eyes of many in the journalism world to this geographic disconnect. Thankfully, steps are being taken to address it. After the election, The Washington Post expanded its “America Desk,” a team of journalists dedicated to covering political issues in the heartland. The US arm of The Guardian began an initiative called “On the Ground” this year that will commission reporting from writers imbedded in rural communities. Ms. Muller told me she’s leading a program called “Beyond the Bubble” that will take USC journalism students to rural Utah next May to work with the editor of a local newspaper. One story at a time, such efforts will bear fruit.

Politically, the press needs to take a critical look at its selection bias. Media outlets left of Fox News and right of MSNBC don’t blatantly overblow certain facts while minimizing others to skew reader perceptions of reality without outright lying – in general, they represent events honestly. But they do make choices about what they cover and how prominently they cover it that give the appearance of leftwing bias.

The New York Times and The Washington Post frequently run stories that align with liberal thinking on political issues. Such stories are deliberately sought out – they aren’t coverage of important political developments that a news cycle would be incomplete without. There’s nothing wrong with the Times dispatching a reporter to Atlanta to find out how “Two Colleges Bound by History Are Roiled by the Me-Too Moment” in sexual harassment cases or telling the tale of a Queens family “Being Deported from Home for the Holidays,” or even The Washington Post sending out a breaking news update via its app on December 2^nd that read “Former Trump aides reveal a campaign filled with screaming fits, constant rivalries and Big Macs.” These are all important stories. But why not look to match them with articles about a rust belt town hurt by the closure of a factory? Or about a community where Obamacare didn’t pan out? The Times ran an excellent piece in this vein titled “Becoming a steelworker liberated her. Then her job moved to Mexico” in October. If conservatives could open a legitimate newspaper or tune into a factual TV news program and expect to see content corresponding to their concerns in balance with ammunition for liberal arguments, they might be won over.

The mainstream media ought to see to it that they are. With partisan hyperbole and actual fake news being the other available sources of information, nothing less than America’s sanity is at stake.