This poll, which measures media credibility, intrigues me more than most. That is because instead of asking whether we believe mainstream media, it asks whether mainstream media are intentionally misinforming us.
Excerpted from Ken Paulson\’s article for USA Today:
The tenets of American journalism can be distilled down to a couple of basics: Reporters should report objectively and serve as a watchdog on people in power. But the public appears to have reservations on both fronts.
According to the soon-to-be released State of the First Amendment survey, just 24% say they believe that the news media try to report without bias, down from 41% last year and a record low since the question was first asked a decade ago.
Don\’t you love the understatement that Mr. Paulson, a long-time newsperson, uses here? “…appears to have reservations”? When less than one in four people cannot say that media even try to be unbiased, they are having a bit more than reservations. They are screaming at the top of their lungs that media are biased.
Do media deserve this level of skepticism?
I would say that I\’m not a good person to ask because I write about media bias almost every day. But if those data are correct, most of the country would be writing the same way.
If you read Mr. Paulson\’s article, you will find that this hurts him, because “In 23 years in newsrooms, I saw consistent and concerted efforts to get stories right. Clearly, the public\’s not convinced.”
I don\’t know Mr. Paulson, but if all he saw was newsrooms trying to get things right, he must have been inhabiting very different newsrooms than the ones I write about…and the respondents in this survey answered questions about.
Was he, for example, working in any of the newsrooms that spent months obsessing on New Jersey Governor Chris Christie possibly having a couple of lanes closed on the George Washington Bridge for a few days (which a federal investigation exonerated him of), but giving the two-days-and-out treatment to Governor Cuomo of neighboring New York, who summarily disbanded an investigative commission he himself had formed – The Moreland Commission – when it started looking at people close to him?
And was Mr. Paulson working in any of the newsrooms which buried the Operation Fast and Furious Scandal? How about the IRS Scandal, or the Clinton Benghazi Scandal, or the Clinton email scandal (which, alone among this group, has gotten at least some coverage, though nothing like the GW Bridge lane closings)?
Maybe Ken Paulson should think about those examples of media coverage before telling us about how concerted the efforts of newsrooms are to get things right.
Is there media bias? Yep.
