A Family Newsroom's Long Bet on Truth, Tested by New Lows

Trust in American news media hit a record low this year: just 28% of U.S. adults say they have a "great deal" or "fair amount" of confidence in newspapers, television, and radio to report fairly and accurately, per Gallup's 2025 survey, the lowest figure recorded since it started asking in the 1970s. Among adults under 30, that number is even worse. It's the exact problem Sara and Dr. Jim Drexler have spent their careers circling from two different directions: she from a family that built a news organization on the bet that truth-telling could survive the market, and he from a classroom built to train people to spot when it doesn't.

The Drexlers spoke with Students Incorporated hosts Mia and Premi in a conversation that opened on higher education and became a family history of American Christian journalism, told by the woman whose father and brother built it from a basement print shop into a national newsroom.

A Basement Press and a Magazine Named for a Psalm

Sara Drexler's father, Max Belz, was a grain dealer in rural Iowa before he became a pastor and, almost by accident, a printer. As a young man he'd taken a job at a small newspaper in southern Minnesota and, in Sara's words, "got the printing bug." Years later, pastoring a church, he ran a print shop out of the family basement: printing presses, a linotype machine, and older brothers who became, as Sara put it, "the worker bees down there really on the printing."

One of those brothers, Joel Belz, took the family trade into journalism school and then to the Presbyterian Journal, which he came to see as too narrow for what he wanted to build. His idea was a newsmagazine reporting actual news (not commentary, not devotionals) through an explicitly biblical lens, named for a line in Psalm 24: "The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it." WORLD Magazine failed more than once early on, Sara recalled, before a children's edition sent into schools caught on and the adult magazine followed it into a lasting readership.

The founding story checks out. WORLD News Group traces its roots to 1981, when Belz launched God's World News for children; WORLD Magazine, the adult biweekly, followed in 1986. Joel Belz stepped down as CEO in 2005 but kept writing his column. He died on February 4, 2024 ("in February of this year," as Sara put it during the taping) at 82, from complications of Parkinson's disease, WORLD News Group announced at the time. The organization now runs a daily news podcast alongside the magazine, one of the "encouraging trends" the Reuters Institute's 2025 Digital News Report cites for investigative journalism's future: continued podcast audience growth, especially among younger news consumers.

Sara also pointed to her sister-in-law, Mindy Belz, who has reported for WORLD since 1986 and became its editor in 2004 after a decade as international editor, covering war and the persecution of Christians across Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and the broader Middle East, per WORLD's archive and her 2016 book. What Sara admired in that work wasn't a stance; it was the absence of one. "I appreciate that she has allowed the story to be before her," Sara said, "not going with an agenda of, I bet the church is doing that, or I bet they're not doing that, but rather letting it be its own story."

What the Algorithm Does to That Instinct

The harder problem, both Drexlers argued, is that almost nobody consumes news the way Mindy Belz reports it anymore. "Your algorithm is what's really directing what you are reading and thinking and reflecting on," Sara said, "because the very nature of an algorithm continues to tighten the focus into what you like. So you start agreeing deeply with yourself, and you're not getting a perspective at all."

The data backs up her instinct. Research on filter bubbles has grown more nuanced since the term entered popular use: a 2024 study in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology found the polarizing effect of recommendation algorithms real but less absolute than the original thesis assumed. What isn't in dispute is the trust gap: the Reuters Institute's 2025 report found only 37% of 18-to-24-year-olds trust the news, nine points below adults 55 and older, even as half of that younger group say social media is where they get their news.

Jim didn't disagree with his wife, but he was less willing to let any source off the hook, including his own. "I don't think that Christian publications are immune to making mistakes," he said, "or to putting out an agenda that they believe is the right one that objectively speaking might not be the truth." Even reporters who share a reader's convictions, he added, "are also human beings, and human beings make mistakes and errors."

The Case for Training the Whole Person

Jim's counter isn't a media literacy checklist but the model of education he's spent his career teaching, most recently as a professor and dean at Covenant College, a small Christian liberal arts school in Georgia now recruiting students in Bangkok. He described the liberal arts model as a "well-rounded education" built around a core curriculum spanning history, science, math, the social sciences, and theology, on the theory that narrow expertise can solve a problem but can't situate it in anything larger.

He's not alone on economic grounds either. Nearly 90% of employers responding to the National Association of Colleges and Employers' 2025 Job Outlook survey said they screen candidates for problem-solving ability, and roughly eight in ten look for strong written communication, both core outputs of a liberal arts education where NACE's own data shows a persistent "preparedness gap" between what employers want and what graduates deliver. Coursera's 2026 Job Skills Report found enrollment in critical-thinking courses jumped 120% year over year, a sign workers are already backfilling a skill college was supposed to build.

"Liberal arts institutions have encouraged students to learn how to think, to learn how to write, to learn how to articulate truth," Jim said, citing business coverage he'd read making the same case for why companies recruit liberal arts graduates into management tracks. Sara framed the idea more personally, describing how her daughter's college roommates (a piano major, a biology major, an education major) learned as much from each other's disciplines as from their own coursework, just by living together.

"Consider the Source, Then Choose It"

Pressed for concrete advice, neither Drexler offered a media-literacy hack. Sara's answer was blunt: read more, discuss more, and do it "in an environment that is listening and that is constructive" rather than one that only confirms what you already believe.

Truth is what you hope the other person hears, not just your words.

That line, which Sara said her mother told her as a child, doubled as the closest thing the conversation had to a thesis: truth-telling as an act aimed at another person's understanding, not just a speaker's accuracy, a standard that indicts sloppy misinformation and technically-true-but-misleading spin alike. Jim's version of the same warning is a joke he tells often on recruiting trips: bragging that "half" of a partner school's senior class enrolled at Covenant, technically true when the class had two seniors and one enrolled. "That can happen in journalism as well," he said. "You can give an angle on something, as my silly example gave, that is misleading."

Their closing advice to students entering a news environment neither fully trusts: consider the source, then choose the source, and hold your own certainty loosely enough to notice when the algorithm is reflecting your own opinion back at you. It's not a fix for a 28% trust number. But it's the same bet Max Belz made in a basement in Iowa, decades before anyone had to worry about an algorithm at all.

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