All Blog Posts from Public Eye

There’s a new Pew Research poll out today on media users and their attitudes, entitled “Internet News Audience Highly Critical of News Organizations.” And the mainstream media is allowing that title to steer a lot of the media coverage of the study. Editor and Publisher followed Pew’s bread crumbs by writing it up this way:

A poll conducted by the Pew Research Center showed that more than half of Americans say U.S. news organizations are politically biased, inaccurate, and don't care about the people they report on.

Respondents who use the Internet as their main source of news -- which is roughly one quarter of all Americans -- were even harsher with their criticism, the poll reported.

More than two-thirds of the Web users said they felt that news organizations don't care about the people they report on; 59 percent said their reporting was inaccurate; and 64 percent they were politically biased.

But as is so often the case with studies of “psychographics” and “attitudes,” there is more meaty stuff in here than just the normal Paranoid Internet User meme/stereotype that is prevalent in the mainstream media. If you go to the actual study and scroll down a tad – past the falling favorability and gender breakdowns – you’ll get to a subhead that reads “Fox Viewers More Critical.”

Read full post…

Get in, get informed and get out.

That seems to be the way we’re dealing with our media outlets in the 21st century, at least according to a study that came out this week. In an MediaNewsDaily article ominously entitled “Time Spent With Media Falters, Digital Spawns Shorter Attention Spans,” it was written that:

The average American consumer spent 3,530 hours with media in 2006--down 0.5% from 2005, according to the just-released estimates from the 21st edition of Veronis Suhler Stevenson's Communications Industry Forecast. That drop follows a period of decelerating growth that the VSS report attributes to the increased efficiency of utilizing digital media--especially online and mobile technologies--which tend to be less time-consuming than traditional media counterparts…

"We all knew that there was only 24 hours in the day, and even with multitasking there would be a point where people maxed out," says James Rutherfurd, executive vice president and managing director at VSS, who oversees the report in conjunction with consultants PQ Media. "It has just come a little faster than we thought because of the efficiency of digital media."

Read full post…

Polls are slippery little devils. There are so many working parts that it’s tough to weigh which detail is more interesting than another. Like a baseball box score, you can say “the pitcher cut his earned run average by a half run” while omitting the fact that, well, he lost. Or you can highlight the shortstop’s 3 for 4 day, and ignore the he is still batting way under .300.

Polls often deal with hot-button third-rail issues like political candidates or Muslims in America or approval ratings – which means the business of parsing the data regularly gets criticized for being overly politicized. And that leads to charges of bias and mischief and shrieks that the media is carrying water for (A) big business, (B) environmentalists, (C) Democrats, (D) Republicans or (E) celebutantes.

So it was with great fascination that I read numerous stories over the weekend that unveiled (drumroll, please) the secrets of love and bliss and long-term marital happiness. And no, it was not in Cosmopolitan or Oprah’s Magazine.

It was the coverage of a Pew Research Center poll about marriage and parenthood. Without the high-decibel debate surrounding most other polls in the media, this Pew study shows the extreme difficulty that most reporters have in boiling down a large amount of data (in this case, 88 pages) into 20 inches of print.

Read full post…

The Information Revolution – Fought To a Draw:

Wired magazine reported on a study suggesting that us Americans aren’t a whole lot more up on current events than we were back in 1989.

More than a decade after the Internet went mainstream, the world's richest information source hasn't necessarily made its users any more informed. A new study from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press shows that Americans, on average, are less able to correctly answer questions about current events than they were in 1989.

While it’s surprising to us that Americans can’t name Vice President Dick Cheney as readily as people used to know Vice President Dan Quayle, in Americans defense we’re more aware of political facts like “Who is the Speaker of the House?” and “Is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court conservative, moderate or liberal?”

And sure, “Daily Show” and “Colbert Report” viewers score higher than CNN and Fox News viewers, but they didn’t even ask Public Eye readers. We know you’d ace the quiz.

Read full post…

There is a new Pew Research Center poll of Muslims in America out today. What are the findings? Your answer to that question depends on where you're reading about it.

If you pick up USA Today at your local newsstand, you’ll find out that “American Muslims Reject Extremes.” If you check out the Washington Post, the headline there tells you “U.S. Muslims Assimilated, Opposed to Extremism.” If you check out the Washington Times, however, you’ll discover that “Young Muslims Defend Suicide Attacks.” The Los Angeles Times says that the American Muslim community is “Mostly Moderate, Not Monolithic.”

Read full post…

With the launch of the “CBS Evening News with Katie Couric” just around the corner, the Pew Research Center set out to find out more about the public’s attitudes concerning the three broadcast network anchors. The USA Today’s Peter Johnson focuses on the familiarity and negative feelings in his write-up today:

Incoming CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric is more familiar to viewers than her competitors are: 66% of people have an opinion of the former Today star, compared with fewer than half for NBC's Brian Williams and ABC's Charles Gibson.

But a new Pew Research Center poll of 1,506 people also shows that although she's more widely known, Couric has more negatives.

As they did with CBS' Dan Rather for years, conservative Republicans see Couric as “liberal” and “biased,” while Democrats, independents and liberal Republicans gave favorable opinions.

By comparison, the poll showed “no overall differences along partisan or ideological lines” when respondents of all stripes were asked about Williams and Gibson.

It’s perhaps not surprising that Couric would be more familiar to the nation than Williams or Gibson but what I found slightly shocking was the largely positive feelings towards all three. Among those who had an opinion of them, “good” was the top description given each one. Considering these were open-ended questions (meaning that respondents were asked to provide a one-word description of each anchor), the amount of positive reactions are a little unbelievable.

Read full post…

TVNewser dives deeper into the Pew survey on the media than we did earlier and uncovers a treasure trove of tidbits and information. Clicking through the entire study ourselves, one troubling (though not unexpected) aspect jumped out: Trust in the media continues to decline. From the report:

Since the mid-1980s, Americans have become increasingly skeptical of what they see, hear, and read in the media, and almost no major news outlet has escaped this trend. For many media outlets there has been little change in public evaluations in the last four years, but ratings for some continue to inch downward.

As a consequence, there is far less variance in public views of the credibility of major news organizations than in the late 1990s. Some of the sources that were viewed as the most credible then have seen their numbers fall substantially, and today no news organization stands out from the crowd as a significantly more reliable source of information.

For example, in 1998, 28% of survey respondents said they “believed all or most” of the news they saw on CBS. That percentage has fallen every year since, hitting 22% this year. It’s a trend seen in both electronic and print journalism, although the Fox News Channel has seen just a smidgen of that erosion and NPR has actually seen an increase in credibility. Is this simply a reflection of today’s “polarized” climate in which people gravitate to news that fits their world-view? Is it a function of having so many sources so readily available?

Read full post…

There haven’t been many positive future indicators for the beleaguered news industry of late, but a new study out gives the MSM a bit of a respite. USA Today media writer Peter Johnson writes up the new survey, which indicates that consumers still mostly turn to mainstream media sources for their news. In fact, the study found that 48% of Americans “spend at least 30 minutes a day” getting their news from TV while just 9% go online for that length of time. Here’s more:

Mainstream media may be able to breathe a sigh of relief, at least for now: A study finds that although the Internet has grown significantly in the past decade, it is supplementing traditional outlets such as newspapers and television, not replacing them.

The biennial news consumption survey of 3,204 adults, out today from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, finds that although a growing number of people go online for headlines, most still also go to newspapers and television for in-depth news.

The findings suggest that "for at least the forseeable future, traditional media are going to continue to co-exist with online news, and that the online news experience is a partner to other traditional news sources and not growing fast enough to supplant traditional media," Andrew Kohut, Pew's president, said Sunday.

Read full post…