Who still is holding American journalism accountable?
That is the question after the disappearance of many outside and inside checks on the news media.
When the Gateway Journalism Review was founded in St. Louis back in 1970, it was part of a wave of publications and other entities dedicated to tracking journalism’s successes and failures.
The 1960s and 1970s were marked by a “newer sort of press criticism, the kind that sought not just to criticize as in attack, but to criticize in the sense of analyzing and suggesting paths toward improvement,” says Kevin Lerner, chair of the department of journalism and sports media at Montclair State University and author of the book “Provoking the Press: (MORE) Magazine and the Crisis of Confidence in American Journalism”.
In 1961, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism started the Columbia Journalism Review, a magazine that was seen by an elite national audience. It was followed by the establishment of similar local reviews in Chicago, New York and elsewhere.
Another national magazine, the American Journalism Review (first named the Washington Journalism Review), started in 1977 and later was published by the University of Maryland journalism school.
In its first issue in 1970, the St. Louis Journalism Review (Gateway’s original name) disclosed that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and St. Louis Globe-Democrat, which editorially were competing publications, actually had a secret joint operating agency that involved splitting profits.
Other notable stories included one about a Post-Dispatch reporter who spied for the police, a St. Louis African-American publisher who used stories supplied by the FBI; the lack of minority hiring by the St. Louis media and the demise of the Globe-Democrat.
In 1973, several foundations funded the National News Council, a private group designed to investigate complaints about media bias and unfair reporting.
At the same time, many newspapers hired ombudsmen to deal with reader complaints, both through periodic columns and private communications. The first was at the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1967. Nearly 50 newspapers employed them by 1980, according to the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based media think tank.
In 2025, few of these still exist. The Gateway and Columbia Journalism reviews appear to be the only ones still published regularly.
For many years, CNN aired “Reliable Sources,” a weekly media commentary program, for an hour on Sunday morning. Its host, Howard Kurtz, moved to Fox News and started a competing program, “Media Buzz.” Both networks canceled these programs within the last year.
The National News Council disbanded in 1984 when its foundation funding ran out. The University of Maryland closed the American Journalism Review in 2015. Most newspapers, notably the New York Times and Washington Post, ended their ombudsmen positions over the years amid widespread cost-cutting.
The Post-Dispatch, which appointed a reader’s advocate in 1974, canceled the position in 2001. The last person to hold the job, Carolyn Kingcade, wrote in her final column, “’Frequently, the reader’s advocate was a last resort for the caller who had been transferred from extension to extension in search of someone who could provide an answer or listen to a comment. If nothing more, the readers’ advocate position showed that the paper thought it was important to try to cut the red tape for its readers…Traditionally, the column gives a public voice and arguably more weight to readers’ concerns. At the very least, a column gives readers some insight into how mistakes happen. It also serves to humanize the newspaper.”
The Organization of News Ombudsmen still operates, but it is dominated by newspeople from countries outside the U.S. One of its current board members is the vice president for standards and inclusion at the Associated Press news service.
Ombudsmen victims of internet and financial havoc
Jack Shafer, a former media columnist for Slate and Politico, says that “many of the ombudsmen assigned to the gig were distinguished journalists but were bad writers who churned out equivocation rather than sharp judgment” Shafer makes exceptions for Dan Okrent at the New York Times and Mike Getler at NPR, “both of whom hit hard and had literary flair.”
Why did this decline in consistent, professional media criticism happen?
Overall, the explanation seems to be the growth of the internet, which has caused financial havoc in the communications industry.
When journalism reviews flourished, the “mainstream media” was dominated by a few national newspapers, news magazines and television networks, and one or two daily newspapers in each big city. They were the main targets of media critics.
Now, the news media are greatly expanded but also fragmented, with news available all over the web.
A 2025 Pew Research Center survey confirmed that a majority of Americans get their news from some digital platform (which still could originate from an organization in the mainstream media) and only a tiny percentage rely on printed newspapers or magazines.
During this same period, the nation’s trust in the news media has plummeted. Gallup reports that more than 70% of Americans in 1972 had a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media, a figure that dropped to 28% by this year.
Press criticism in the United States has not disappeared.
The Columbia Journalism Review, which calls itself “the most respected voice on press criticism,” no longer appears in print but publishes a magazine online twice a year and a daily newsletter.
The first newsletter edition in October 2025 under a new editor, Jem Bartholomew, called on the news media “not just to chase the story, but to connect it with the historical moment; to avoid the news cycle’s amnesiac tendencies; to contextualize which policies are part of a longer trajectory, and which steer us into scary and uncharted waters.”
The Columbia Journalism Review named Betsy Morais as editor in October 2025, succeeding Sewell Chan, who was fired after complaints from staff members. In an introductory essay, Morais outlined the publication’s goals, including “to lookwhere news consumers fall in the gap between fact-based journalism and partisanship, or propaganda,” and “to solicit ideas from a variety of smart people, from inside and outside the news industry.”
NPR employs a part-time public editor, Kelly McBride, a senior vice president of the Poynter Institute. McBride believes that “the landscape of media criticism has been changed and fractured as much as the landscape of media has been changed and disrupted.” She says, “There is a significant amount of polarized critique that is often created with the goal of undermining the public’s ability to trust factual information.”
McBride writes columns that appear on the NPR website. As one example, in October 2025, she described a “slightly awkward” interview in which Donald Trump adviser Peter Navarro told NPR host Steve Inskeep, “We go back a long ways, brother.” McBride concluded it was OK for NPR to include that reference in a broadcast because the two men are not close friends.
In October, Poynter announced a new project, The Indianapolis Public Editor, which “will act as a bridge between the many newsrooms that serve the community and news consumers. This project is designed to test the effectiveness of independent accountability and public education in a local news market.”
Margaret Sullivan, a former public editor at the New York Times and media columnist for the Washington Post, says “there’s a great deal of media commentary and criticism these days, but it’s happening less in the traditional formats of journalism reviews and ombudsman columns. On Substack, for example, former Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob offers smart commentary. At the Columbia Journalism Review, Bill Grueskin has reimagined the ‘Darts and Laurels’ column. Social media offers some perceptive commentary. But it is diffuse, and probably therefore less effective.”
Among other online sources on the media are Dan Froomkin’s Press Watch, which calls itself “an intervention for political journalism,” WNYC’s podcast On The Media and Oliver Darcy’s Status, which “takes readers inside the corridors of media power.”
Former columnist Shafer observes that, “there is more coverage of the press – who got hIred, who got fired, who bought what – than ever before but not that much genuine press criticism.”
FCC required ombudsman
In the broadcast media, as part of a deal to approve broadcast licenses held by Skydance, now the parent company of CBS News, the Federal Communications Commission required appointment of an ombudsman to review complaints about news coverage. Some observers have expressed skepticism because the job went to Kenneth Weinstein, the former president and chief executive of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank.
Author Steven Brill, who ran a journalism review called Brill’s Content between 1998 and 2001, now, with former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, runs a website called NewsGuard, which says it “helps news consumers assess the reliability of sources they encounter online.”
Brill believes that “there is more journalism criticism than ever – just not usually by professional journalists but by websites with one ax to grind or another. Because so much of the ‘criticism’ is a rant from one side or another, those criticized just say it can be ignored.”
The idea of a new National News Council is being discussed. Stuart Brotman of The Media Institute, who was a staff member of the original council, wrote in Editor & Publisher in August that such an organization “could help the news media prove that they deserve to be free and that their freedom protects fundamental democratic values.”
What is missing with the loss of consistent journalism criticism in prominent places?
It’s impossible to quantify what American news consumers are not comprehending when they are bombarded daily with news stories from a bewildering variety of sources that may be incomplete, biased or just plain inaccurate.
What is clear is that the prevalence of media criticism in the last century has deteriorated in the 21st century’s first half.
As journalism historian Kevin Lerner puts it, “When we lose the culture of critical analysis of journalism, we lose meaning. It reduces information and culture to commodities.”
