Today we’ll digress from the usual ombudsbusiness to devote this space to some fascinating — some might say disturbing — revelations about the news media:
What the American public thinks about the media and what journalists think about their own craft, as discovered in two recent nationwide polls.
First, let’s look at the public’s attitudes, measured by a Pew Research Center survey conducted among 1,211 adults nationwide in mid-February and reported in the Los Angeles Times.
Americans are “paying less attention to mainstream news media and watching or reading with far less enthusiasm than 10 years ago,” said the Times report of the poll.
The public is “especially critical of coverage by network news and large national newspapers.” Only 26 percent of Americans say they enjoy network news “a great deal,” down from 42 percent in a 1985 Gallup poll.
Only 27 percent say they look forward to reading the paper each day, down from 42 percent in 1985.
Past polls, said the Times, “also have found increasing public criticism of the news media,” but this one “paints a much starker picture of press credibility and the public’s growing alienation from the mainstream media.”
Favorable ratings for network TV news have fallen steadily from 30 percent in 1985 and 27 percent in 1992 to 15 percent in the newest study.
Network news viewership has dropped: Only 40 percent of those polled said they watch a nightly network news show, compared with 60 percent four years ago.
Favorable ratings for large national newspapers have dropped from 53 percent four years ago to 41 percent today.
Pew reported that a majority of Americans, 56 percent, believe news stories often are inaccurate. The 1985 Gallup poll reported nearly the exact opposite. Then, 55 percent believed the news media generally got things right.
Next, let’s look at journalists’ own view of their craft, as revealed in polls of professionals around the country, conducted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors and released last week.
These are excerpts from the Associated Press and New York Times reports of these surveys. One survey queried 1,037 editors, reporters and editorial writers at 61 papers. Another survey, an annual examination by the ASNE of minority employment figures, got responses from 983 of the nearly 1,500 dailies in America.
“Newspaper people (said the AP report) tend to consider their own papers dull and believe they are losing importance in American life….Most of the journalists questioned plan to leave the field…
“One striking finding is that when journalists sit down to read their own newspapers, they often don’t find them interesting. Sixty-four percent said they only occasionally or rarely consider their own papers ‘a good read.’ ”
Forty percent of the journalists think their papers are getting better; 21 percent think they’re getting worse.
When the same question was asked in a similar survey nine years ago, 54 percent thought their papers were improving, and only 13 percent thought they were declining.
“As for the impact of newspapers on society,” the AP reported, “a 55 percent majority think newspapers will play a less important part in American life in 10 years than now. Eight years ago, 33 percent thought that way.”
As other credible polls have shown in the past, most newspaper people consider themselves liberals. The proportion of those calling themselves conservatives or Republicans was down to 15 percent from 22 percent in 1988. Since 1988 the percentage of liberals stayed steady at 61 percent, but independents rose from 17 to 24 percent.
Some other key findings in the polling shed further light on the anatomy of American newspaper offices:
- Newspaper people still are preponderantly white and male. Among journalists under 30, half are women. Among those over 50, only 22 percent are women and only 1 percent are minorities.
- Of the approximately 54,000 workers in the newsrooms surveyed (983 out of nearly 1,500 total), 6,100 are African-American, Latino, American Indian and Asian-American. That’s 11.4 percent of the total workers. The same number were at work in last year’s ASNE ethnicity survey, but then the total newsroom work force was slightly higher, 55,000.
- Asked to rate their paper’s coverage of minorities, 29 percent of whites thought it was good or excellent; 11 percent of African-Americans thought so.
- Only 43 percent of the journalists said they intend to remain on a newspaper staff by the time they reach age 60. Among African-American journalists, only 18 percent said they plan to stay that long.
Your reactions to all of these provocative findings are, as always, most welcome. The subject is of profound importance to the media and needs to be discussed, both inside the outside this business.
