• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

David Bauder has spent decades covering media for the Associated Press. If there is still a nationally trusted observer of journalism, it is he. His recent AP story on teenagers losing faith in news points to something we should stop treating as a revelation. Young people don’t trust journalism because they don’t trust journalists -- not the vocabulary, not the posture, not the idea that the profession somehow stands above the fray. They see a field that promises accountability but often protects its own.

Bauder’s reporting made that dissatisfaction tangible. When teenagers were asked for one word to describe the news media, 84% offered something negative: “biased,” “boring,“ “fake,” “depressing,” “confusing” and “scary."

People like to call this cynicism. But it might be accuracy.

Journalism used to be a civic institution built on scarcity. Today it is a profession struggling to prove why it deserves trust. Tomorrow it may look less like content and more like public service.

The history of journalism is really the history of who gets to tell stories. If you bought ink by the barrel, you controlled reality. Then desktop publishing cracked open the pressroom. Blogs gave outsiders columns. Camcorders and phones turned anyone into a recorder. YouTube gave them reach. TikTok made storytelling a native dialect.

We gained more voices, but not more agreement about what matters.

Bauder and Richard Gingras see that from opposite ends of the industry. Bauder reports on media for the last major wire service left standing, the Associated Press. Gingras, until recently, was Google’s global vice president for news, essentially Google’s top executive responsible for how news is surfaced across its products (search results, Google News, etc.) Google is  the invisible architecture that shapes what billions see, search, and believe.

They aren’t contradicting each other. They’re describing different angles of the same collapse.

Bauder sees a generation tuning journalism out because it fails them. Gingras sees a generation tuning journalism out because they’ve already moved on. When we talked, he said, “Journalism isn’t monolithic.” The issue isn’t that young audiences distrust journalists. It is that journalism still behaves as if its authority is assumed rather than earned. “Are you covering who fixes the potholes?” he asked. “That’s where civic trust starts.”

Youth advocates like Emma Lembke see that gap from the other side. “Young people don’t hate information. They hate feeling fooled,” she told me. Her generation isn’t turning away from news,  it’s rejecting the way news has treated them.

Bauder, for his part, was startled by how deep the misunderstanding runs. “A lot of young people don’t know what journalism is,” he said. “Some even think reporters exist to protect people in power.” When teenagers believe the mission of journalism is the opposite of what journalists think it is, that isn’t a PR problem, it’s an existential one.

Gen Z watched newsrooms chase outrage cycles. They watched cable news turn panel arguments into civic theater. They watched algorithms decide what stories mattered. They didn’t inherit Walter Cronkite; they inherited content.

Their skepticism isn’t distance. It is noticing how the game works.

Which brings us to Aaron Parnas.

He is 26, a former lawyer, and one of the most influential independent news voices on TikTok. He does in under a minute what cable news often can’t in half an hour: summarize the situation, explain why it matters, and make people feel like they should keep paying attention. Millions trust him more than they trust network anchors. When I asked him why his clips work, he put it simply: “People want news that feels like someone talking to them, not talking at them.”

Parnas isn’t an exception. He’s the leading edge of something bigger: journalism without institutions, credibility built in public, audiences acting as their own editors. His authority doesn’t come from a masthead. It comes from consistency, tone, effort, and a camera close to his face.

To older journalists, that feels unserious. To younger audiences, it feels familiar and human.

Matthew Stevens sees this shift from a very different vantage point. He is a college junior, a digital activist, and a member of our Gen Z advisory board. When Emma asked him to react to Bauder’s findings, he made a point that stuck with me: Young people are not rejecting information itself. They are rejecting the way it arrives. They get news from social platforms, podcasts, and citizen reporting that feels faster and closer than traditional coverage.

As he put it, “They don't like the news because they don't see the real work that goes into it. They just like to see those little videos pop up every once in a while on their social media feed.”

So what was journalism? A civic institution built on scarcity and distribution power. What is journalism now? A confused identity,  a profession asking to be believed while not always proving why it should be. What might journalism become? Something practical. Something closer to civic infrastructure than content.

That's where the opportunity lies. Journalism isn’t disappearing; it's being stripped of its costume. The teenagers Bauder interviewed aren’t rejecting truth. They’re refusing a performance of authority that doesn’t invite them in.

The people who controlled storytelling for most of the last century don’t control it anymore. Platforms stepped in, often without the accountability newsrooms claimed to hold. That hasn’t created clarity. It has created uncertainty about who is responsible for sense-making. Somewhere in that mess is an opening for journalism to rebuild itself, not by insisting on belief, but by proving usefulness one community at a time.

Looking back at "Unfiltered," "Eye On People," CNN’s Perspectives, and the rise of citizen video after 9/11, I don’t see those experiments as nostalgia. They look like early drafts of where journalism is heading: messy, participatory, sometimes uncomfortable, but recognizably human.

Parnas is one signal of that future. He isn’t a replacement for journalism, but a reminder that audiences will find news that serves them, with or without institutions.

When cameras left the studio and entered people’s hands, journalism changed. We are in another version of that moment. 

Gen Z has made it clear that authority is not granted. It is noticed, tested, and accepted when it holds up. Journalism once assumed it already carried that standing. Now it will have to earn it, and keep earning it, one audience at a time.