--- I don't know where the husband surfs most of the time. Haven't the
foggiest notion of where he pulls some of the stuff he comes up with.
He's very much like a ten year old boy on summer vacation when it comes
to the internet: send him out the door in the moring; expect him to be
filthy when he comes home at the end of the day, with a frog hanging
out of his pocket. He fills my inbox with links he thinks I'll find
interesting. Mostly, it's an exercise in hit and miss. Sometimes he
hits and sometimes he misses. He hit tonight. The State of the News Media 2004: An Annual Report on American Journalism. It was written by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. It came out in February, but I haven't seen much written about it so I thought I'd link to it.
I haven't read the whole thing, but I did hit the highlights. I found the Public Attitudes section to be surprising.
Public attitudes about the press have been declining for nearly 20
years.
Americans think journalists are sloppier, less professional, less
moral, less caring, more biased, less honest about their mistakes and
generally more harmful to democracy than they did in the 1980s.
Consider a few changes in the numbers between 1985 and 20021: The
number of Americans who think news organizations are highly
professional declined from 72 to 49 percent.
Those who think news organizations are moral declined from 54 to 39
percent, and those who think they are immoral rose from 13 to 36
percent.
Those who feel news organizations try to cover up their mistakes rose
from 13 to 67 percent. The number of Americans who think news
organizations generally get the facts straight declined from 55 to 35
percent.
Those who feel who feel news organizations care about the people they
report on declined from 41 to 30 percent.
Those who think news organizations are politically biased rose from 45 to 59 percent. {emphasis
added by moi}
What I find surprising is that there's only a 14 point jump in the
number of people who find the media to be biased from 1985 to today.
Given all of the discussion regarding bias in the media---and the
inception of FOX News---I would have thought that number would be much
higher, and let me see if I can remember enough from college statistics
to tell you why.
I have some issues with the methodology of these numbers. I'm no stat
professor, but I do remember a few things about my time in those
classes, and one of the few was that for comparison purposes, an apple
must indeed be an apple. Oranges will simply not work, or the result is
skewed. The 1985 numbers, it seems, came from one source, MORI (I
think--I can't find an actual source for the 1985 #'s), and the 2002
numbers came from a Pew Research Report that seems to have been done to
see what the public's support for the media was post-9/11. When you
follow the link provided in the bibliography to the study results at the Pew website
you can see they used numerous samples and their reporting seems to be
fine. The trouble here seems to be that I can't find that MORI report
anywhere, provided that's the report they used for the 1985 numbers.
If I want to compare apples to apples, I need to know that there are
indeed two apples, and not one apple and one orange. I want to know if
the sample sizes were the same. I want to know if they covered the same
geographic regions in the 2002 study as they did in the 1985 study. I
want to know what the margin of error was on the 1985 study. I want to
know if the the 2002 survey asked *exactly* the same questions as the
1985 survey. And it seems, to me at least, that they aren't. The data
was compiled by the authors of the study and compared from that point
on, which, as my Stat101 professor would have told you had you been in
class with me on day one is pretty much par for the course. I'll never
forget what the man said: The
first and most important thing you have to learn about statistics is
that the numbers can back up any assertion you want if you know how to
manipulate them to that end. This, I suppose, was his best effort
to bolster three hundred students who wanted nothing more than to be
back in their rooms, sleeping off the previous night's hangover, but he
had a point. Here you have a study conducted about journalism by those
in the profession. Which to me sort of sounds like all the arguments
that lawyers and doctors shouldn't regulate themselves. And as we all
know, journalists are forever crying out that there's no bias in their
reporting, so you can let your minds wander from there about some of
the preconceived notions they brought to this study. It's completely
conceivable that they thought that number was high. A fourteen point
jump in seventeen years? It doesn't ring right. That number should, by
all the evidence placed in front of us, be higher than a measly
fourteen point increase. Seventeen years where there was huge increase
in the number of cable news media outlets over that period of time?
Seventeen years where people went from getting their news from one of
three major networks and their local paper to perhaps jumping online
and hitting the news feeds directly? Most people, myself included,
didn't think twice about bias in the news media until we had other
outlets to compare and contrast our regular news coverage with. And it's only a fourteen point jump?
It seems specious to me. It just doesn't sound right. I would have
thought that number would be much higher, but I can't even check the
veracity of their claim because the 1985 numbers are not available.
It's too late to go into this any more. I'm barely staying awake. If
someone wants to run with this, by all means, go for it.