Ranting Profs comments on the WP article that follows.
THEY'LL DO ANYTHING TO AVOID HAVING TO FACE THE TRUTH
By Cori Dauber
Do you ever feel the real problem is that the media looks down on you, condescends? Well I've noticed a pattern whenever there's a study that says people aren't satisfied with the media we get. Someone will come along from the industry and move heaven and earth to find a way to explain that study away. Take this piece in yesterday's Post as a prime example.
People don't read the paper, but have an opinion? Oh, please. Everyone picks up a paper every once in awhile, if only out of sheer boredom in an airport or a dentist's office.
We think local news is tainted, but believe it anyway? Sorry, pal. We think it's tainted -- and think it's the best of a horrible lot.
Why do people think CNN is trustworthy? Precisely because, I'd guess, they turn to it for breaking, live news: the moments when reporters are least relevant. We are simply watching events unfold.
More military and international front page stories? You have absolutely got to be kidding me. A study like that is skewed beyond all belief by spurts during crises and wars. The question is what goes on during the periods between crises. And the question is what kind of stories are the cable outlets following, so that the serious stories are squeezed when it comes to depth. And the bigger question is what are the percentages post 9/11, when the industry essentially conceded that the balance was inadequate.
But after noting that it is almost impossible to do a study of how people feel about the "media" because the media is so many different kinds of things, meeting so many different kinds of needs -- which is absolutely and no doubt true -- he reaches the same conclusion they always reach when confronted with studies telling them what these studies always tell them, that the public is dissatisfied, doesn't like what it's getting and doesn't trust them:
People are too busy, too lazy, or just aren't very interested in the world at large. Hard to blame the media for that.
Is it any wonder things keep getting worse year after year?
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The News, Dear Readers, Is Not as Bad as You Say It Is
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
By Paul Farhi
Sunday, March 21, 2004; Page B02
Once again, the news about the news media is bleak. Or so we are asked to believe . In a 500-page report released last week and grandly called "The State of the News Media 2004," a Washington group called the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) found very little of excellence to celebrate. The report is an exhaustive compilation and analysis of hundreds of previous polls and studies detailing the media's faltering vital signs. As such, the PEJ has catalogued the usual woes: rising superficiality and sensationalism in news coverage, declining circulation and TV news viewership, cutbacks in newsroom resources and, most distressingly, brimming public mistrust and disdain for the work journalists do.
A sad state of affairs, no? Actually, not really. The news media have certainly had their share of scandal lately, and the exploits of alleged serial fabricators Jayson Blair, of the New York Times, and now Jack Kelley, of USA Today, have done little to bolster public trust in the media. Still, reading navel-gazing reports such as the PEJ's leaves me aghast not at the media -- but at the public.
At the heart of such reports lie a series of unexamined contradictions. I'd be more inclined to believe sky-is-falling assessments of the media if those conducting these studies also took into consideration the tendency of the public to offer knee-jerk responses, and the public's lack of curiosity and its hypocrisy toward the media.
For example, consider a Pew Research Center poll conducted last year and included in the PEJ study. Pew found that a mere 20 percent of respondents rated newspapers as "believable," down from about 28 percent in 1985. Shocking! But it might be helpful to ask a follow-up question: How did the public make such a determination? Newspaper readership has been on a downward slide for 50 years; in 2003, just over half the adult population (54 percent) claimed to read the paper at least once a week, which means that roughly half the people participating in a survey about newspapers are rendering an opinion about something they pay little or no attention to.
Similarly, many of those surveyed said they think local TV news broadcasts are "improperly influenced" by advertisers (42 percent), station owners (40 percent), big business (37 percent) and elected officials (30 percent), according to a survey last year by the Radio-Television News Directors Foundation. Also shocking. But it's hard to square these findings with another one: People rate their local TV news as the most "believable" of all news media by a wide margin, and have for years. In other words, broad segments of the public think local TV news is corrupt or tainted -- and say they believe it, anyway?
The logical disconnect even infects public attitudes toward specific media outlets. People often rank CNN as the most trustworthy national TV news source (it is indeed one of the few outlets whose credibility ratings have grown over the past 20 years). But even during prime-time hours, CNN attracts about one-tenth the audience of one of the early-evening newscasts on CBS, ABC and NBC. How can a large percentage of people, selected at random in a national poll, proclaim CNN's reliability if they're not actually watching it? Conversely, if they believe it's trustworthy, why aren't they watching it? As it is, this stacks a contradiction on top of a fallacy. CNN and cable news generally tend to rely on "live" information (interviews, breaking news and reporter "stand ups"). These forms of reporting have certain strengths, but trustworthiness and reliability aren't at the top of the list. Interviews tend to be partisan and one-sided, and live breaking news is the most mistake-prone form of journalism.
While the media tend to lament cuts in newsroom resources, it's not clear that the overall "quality" of news suffers as a result. The PEJ report cites the American Society of Newspaper Editors' finding that newspapers employ 2,200 fewer newsroom employees today than in 1990. I'm all for more journalists and better journalism, but that hardly seems like a crippling job loss, given that 154 daily papers went out of business during this period, given that daily newspaper circulation declined 11 percent, and given that a new generation of newsgathering technology (cell phones, e-mail, computer databases, satellite and wireless transmission, etc.) has made reporting faster and more efficient.
In fact, news is a growth business, not a stagnant or declining Rust Belt industry. Some older types of news media have cut back, but the overall picture is healthy. Fox News Channel and MSNBC, which didn't exist in 1990, now employ 2,000 people between them. CNN employs another 4,000. Then there are the jobs created by the burgeoning Spanish-language media, local cable news operations and online news outfits.
As for the notion that the media have become less "serious" and more obsessed with scandal, celebrities and entertainment, I'd say the jury is still out. PEJ's own analysis of front-page stories in large-circulation papers shows otherwise. The number of stories about government and foreign affairs did fall somewhat between 1977 and 2003, but these kinds of stories still occupy nearly half of front-page acreage. At the same time, stories about the military tripled, "domestic affairs" news doubled and science subjects quintupled. Crime stories fell by more than half. Entertainment and celebrity topics? They comprised just 1 percent of front-page stories last year, down from 2 percent in 1987.
Serious journalists, because they're so serious, always think the public is clamoring for more high-minded news. They complain that the news has been "dumbed down," that if we'd only curb our "obsession" with cheesy celebrity or scandal or crime or "lifestyle" stories, readers and viewers would hold the media in higher regard. The PEJ report implies that the declining circulation of the three big newsweeklies, Time, Newsweek and U.S. News and World Report, has something to do with their softer emphasis over the years. It contrasts this with two very sober magazines, the Economist and the Atlantic, which have seen circulation gains in recent years and haven't, the report notes, "measurably lightened their content." Well, let's check the scoreboard: The three newsweeklies, even with those declines, had a combined average circulation of 9.2 million per issue last year; the Atlantic and the Economist barely exceeded 800,000. Maybe the Atlantic and the Economist aren't lightweight enough.
Tom Rosenstiel, PEJ executive director, acknowledges that there's some "fascinating dissonance" in public attitudes toward the media. But he adds, "Even if one dismisses this as ill-informed, the media needs an audience, so you have to worry about it."
Well, maybe. But I've always thought that asking people their opinion of the "news media" or even "television news" was like asking people their opinion of "lawyers" or "used-car salesmen." That is, it's an abstraction, and one that invites a reflexive, generic cynicism (people tend to remember the things the media got wrong rather than the many things accurately reported). "The media" are, of course, many things. They are CBS News and The Washington Post and "Entertainment Tonight" and the Drudge Report and Fly Fishing magazine and maybe even "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart." Even within a specific news organization, the term has great variability: Should we judge NBC News by Tim Russert's interviews on "Meet the Press," or by another Princess Di piece on "Dateline" or by Katie Couric's cooking segments on the "Today" show?
Look a little closer at public dissatisfaction with the news media and what you find is less than you think. Virtually all major news media -- print, radio, broadcast and cable TV -- have been losing readers and viewers for years, and in some cases for decades. Can this really be evidence of the media's failure, or is something else going on? The audience defection, after all, has affected all kinds of news outlets, no matter their perceived trustworthiness, depth or quality. The reasons for citizen disengagement from the news, like falling voter turnout, are without doubt complex. But I suspect they boil down to a few simple things: People are too busy, too lazy, or just aren't very interested in the world at large. Hard to blame the media for that.
Are the news media showing signs of declining quality? I'm sure some of them are, some of the time. But as the PEJ report notes, "Quality news and information are more available than ever before. Yet so . . . are the trivial, the one-sided and the false."
Sounds to me like the marketplace of ideas is alive and well.
Author's e-mail:farhip@washpost.com
Paul Farhi is a political reporter on The Post's National staff who has also covered the media. |
