“The internet news audience – roughly a quarter of all Americans – tends to be younger and better educated than the public as a whole. People who rely on the internet as their main news source express relatively unfavorable opinions of mainstream news sources and are among the most critical of press performance. As many as 38% of those who rely mostly on the internet for news say they have an unfavorable opinion of cable news networks such as CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC, compared with 25% of the public overall, and just 17% of television news” viewers.”
That’s verbatim from a new poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, the long-time leader in measuring attitudes about the media. The poll, which came out Thursday, is a treasure trove of new numbers for those interested in what the news audience thinks of the news media. Here’s a link to the full study, and here’s my summary of a few key findings:
Fresh poll numbers are irresistible, but it’s dangerous to get excited about small short-term movements. Part of the beauty of this study is that Pew and its predecessor organization, the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press, have been asking and analyzing many of the same questions now for more than 20 years.
If you check out the table at right, you’ll see that on most measures of respect or admiration (is the press “moral?” does it protect democracy? does it get its facts straight?) a majority of the public gave the favorable answer when the question was first asked in 1985, a minority thinks so now. The total decline isn’t as steep on any of the measures as some of the hand-wringing inside Mainstream Media Land might suggest.
You’ll also see that on most of the questions, the current low number is not the all-time low. (Just a tip: you should disregard the Nov. 2001 poll; the media was enjoyed a favorability bump after the attacks of Sept. 11.) But other than that bump, most of the damage to the media’s standing occurred between 1985 and 1999 and things have held kind of steady or actually improved since then. That’s counter-intuitive to me. From the inside of the news craft it has felt like our public standing was spiraling ever downward.
Do you have any theories as to why the damage occurred during the 1990s and then flattened out? My first thought would be to consider the impact of the rise of right-wing talk radio (think especially of Rush Limbaugh, then his many imitators, and the extent to which their success relied on convincing conservatives that the mainstream media was biased against them and couldn’t be trusted).
Those familiar with my previous writing on the issue know that I’m not a liberal bias denier. But the hyper-simplified way that Limbaugh and his imitators flog the issue is the opposite of intellectual honesty. Anyway, even if my theory is right, the overall long-term pattern suggests that the impact of Limbuaghism is now small-to-nonexistent.
Further evidence for the same theory, I suppose, would be the next table from the Pew report, which shows a steadily rising gap between Democrats and Republicans in the favorability of their attitude toward the big national newspapers and the network news shows. It’s quite impressive and pretty steady the way the gap grows by party ID. In 1985, the partisan gap is present but so small it would be margin of error. But by 2007, it is Mars and Venus, with a 38 percentage point gap between Democrats and Republicans on the favorability of their impression of the big national newspapers.
I won’t pretend to be shocked by this. The actual question on national newspapers mentions the New York times and the Washington Post. I know that many conservatives view them as liberal propaganda sheets.
In that past, I’ve believed that the so-called polarization of U.S. politics was a bit overstated, because most people aren’t political enough to be polarized. But Pew’s section on the growing partisan divide has me wondering. And the second table suggests that the gap by partisan ID is still growing. The rise of a few liberal super-blogs, like Kos, has often been cited as the left’s answer to right-wing talk radio. Maybe so. I do worry though that the blogosphere makes it ever-easier for citizens to spend their reading time having their preconceptions constantly reinforced.
What think?
I just finished reading progressive commentary on problem with msm (reporting quotes from competing viewpoints without analysis of facts) over at Matthew Yglesias, only to come here to see dems view media much more positively than republicans. My suggested solution for a better informed public was more people accessing online sources of news analysis (thinking sites such as this one or tpm.) But I’ve already come to see the problem with this, having also just received my welcome letter to Human Events online (which includes not only weekly columns from Ann Coulter and Robert Novak but also an offer for a free book that addresses all the myths related to global warming.)
You seem to be right on to with your closing comment that “the blogosphere makes it ever-easier for citizens to spend their reading time having their preconceptions constantly reinforced.”
Hate your neighbor seems to be in vogue. Regretfully, this means valid points made by each side are brushed aside with slurs and irrelevant attacks by the other side.
In this atmosphere, to find a story that will not be perceived as thorough, factual, and unbiased by someone is very difficult, and so unusual as to be positively exhilarating, except in “safe” subjects (although they are becoming fewer and fewer as “if I feel ‘dissed’ you must apologize” takes over the public arena).
I have often wondered what the electronic media would do if the word “but” was banned from the airways for two months. This lame attempt to present “both sides”, but from one viewpoint (as PBS does all the time)fools no-one and only exacerbates the problem.
It seems to me that the public is intelligent enough that it would be more honest and also more acceptable if each byline also included the following: “XXX voted for the XXX candidate in four of the past five presidential elections, and for the XXXX candidate in one of them.” Then let him/her swing away.
Knowing honestly the bias (not prejudice) of the writer would allow the reader to judge accordingly, and to appreciate balanced presentations even more. Those who blindly disagree could just skip articles by those whose views they oppose, and the rest of us would, I suspect, accept the information for what it usually is: the statement of a partisan position. News media, with this data presented, would be put under significant pressure to present a balance of viewpoints or lose adherents.
In the present system, the only options the viewer/reader usually has are to abandon the source entirely (and thius suffer the loss of all information)and/or to register their perceptions in polls such as this one.
One caution — no matter how “respected” the poll, the implication that these are not also influenced by partisan views is highly questionable. So I take these results with a grain of salt.
Speaking only for the left side of the blogosphere, I think our major voices are all tightly tethered to the mainstream media. Our job is to find the “good” news stories and link to them. The editorializing and opinionating is the price we make our readers pay for access to our links, but without those links we wouldn’t have readers. There are plenty of liberal blogs that just link to other blogs’ posts, but that’s not true of any of the top blogs, all of which rely on mainstream news stories.
Why is there a blogosphere? In my opinion it’s because our corporate-owned media stopped picking up the important stories broken by their competitors. The only way to remain abreast of the breaking news was to read a dozen or more newspapers a day. Blogs did away with that by providing links to the hot stories, saving readers time and effort.
Eric, I would challenge you to follow Daily Kos, Eschaton, Firedoglake, Hullabaloo and Glenn Greenwald’s Salon blog for a week, making an effort to try to click on ALL of their links. Keep track of how many go to major media, how many to other blogs, and how often the blog links dead end without any major media links. I think you’ll see that I’m correct when I say that the lefty blogosphere is walking arm and arm with the major media, however critically we do so. Our value-added service comes from finding the news stories that contain actual news, and not just press releases.
As a blogger I may be a bit of an opionated bottom feeder, but I’m proud of our movement. If you give us just one week as I have suggested, I think you’ll come to understand us much better. And, of course, you can do the same with the Republican blogosphere, but I think you’ll find they’re substantially different from us, linking more heavily to their sister bloggers and relying less on mainstream news sources.
The lefty blogosphere keeps growing, while the right’s version is contracting. Not because the left is more popular than the right, but because the left “plays fair” first, and our editorializing is done in the context of objective news stories. We think the truth is on our side, and we work hard to expose our readers to news stories that show them the truth about what’s happening.