All Blog Posts from Public Eye

There are some days that Captain Louis Renault from “Casablanca” could be a media writer.

Because he’d certainly be “Shocked, Shocked!!!” to find some things out about the media landscape, circa 2007.

This week’s Renault-worthy headline? “Poll: Republicans and Democrats View Media Differently”

You think? Really? According to an Editor and Publisher article:

A new Gallup poll released today show a wide gap between how Republicans and Democrats view the mass media. Nearly 3 in 4 Republicans say the media is "too liberal." But overall, Gallup's director Frank Newport reports, "less than half of Americans, regardless of partisanship, have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the mass media."…

More than twice as many Americans say the news media are too liberal (45%) rather than too conservative (18%). But Newport adds: "Americans' views of the bias in news media are highly related -- as would be expected -- to underlying political orientation."

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Gallup has found, unsurprisingly, that most Americans (56 percent) believe the media is providing an inaccurate portrait of the situation in Iraq. Here's the fun part: 36 percent of those that question the coverage said it makes the situation appear to be better than it actually is, while 61 percent said it makes it appear worse that it actually is. In other words, people are sure that the media is hopelessly biased. They just can't agree on which way the bias runs.

These findings point to the challenges faced by large news organizations like CBS, which want to hold on to the wide audience they've traditionally attracted. A large portion of the audience, it seems, wants the network and its competitors to skew their coverage in one direction, while another large portion wants them to skew their coverage the other way. And they can't do both.

In the days before the Internet, when the "Evening News" was one of the few available news sources, the middle was a pretty safe place to be. Viewers from the left and right might occasionally be annoyed by the tenor of the coverage, but they gravitated to the evening newscasts anyway, since (a) they remained more or less in the middle and (b) viewers had little in the way of alternatives.

That has changed, for three primary reasons. The first is the rise of the alternatives – blogs, Web sites, and news outlets that cater to just about every ideological position out there. If you want your news more liberal or more conservative than you find on the "Evening News", it's easy to turn off CBS and find it. The second reason is the sustained assault on the media's credibility by partisans, from Spiro "nattering nabobs of negativism" Agnew through David Brock and Brent Bozell and George W. Bush. And the third reason is mistakes by the media such as "Rathergate," which have lessened the press' credibility and played into partisan media critics' hands.

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How effective have President Bush’s efforts to rally the nation around the Iraq war been? Depends on what you read, at least today. If you’re waking up to The Washington Post this morning, the administration is looking pretty good with this headline: “Bush’s Support Jumps After a Long Decline.” ABC News’s Web site headlines the Post-ABC poll: “Poll: Bush’s Approval Ratings Climb.”



On the other hand, if you’re picking up the USA Today, the situation isn’t quite so optimistic in this headline: “Bush has ways to go to change Iraq views, poll shows.” The USA Today Web site sports this header: “Poll: Bush fails to sway public on Iraq.” Meanwhile, CNN’s Web site headlines the poll (it’s a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll) this way: “Poll: Iraq speeches, election don’t help Bush.”



So, which is a news consumer to believe? Well, both of them actually. Or neither, whichever you prefer. The reality is both polls were conducted over the same time period, last Friday through Sunday, both interviewed 1,003 adults across the nation and both have the same margin of error, plus or minus 3%. And headlines for both basically reflect the findings inside.



In the CNN/USA Today poll, Bush’s approval ratings rose from 37% to 41%. In The Post/ABC poll, they went from 39% to 47%. Other numbers were comparable. Why? Well, rather than completely bore everyone with statistical analysis and sample breakdowns, it’s just as important to keep this in mind: Polls are a snapshot of a given time and specific questions, not always an authoritative reflection of broad sentiment. And something like 1 in every 20 polls are simply wrong, statistically speaking. As President Bush is fond of saying, the polls will go up and down and indeed they do.



The press loves polls because the numbers within are something you can see, touch and chew over. And news organizations love trumpeting the findings of their own polls, CBS News included. Polling isn’t cheap and it’s hard to justify the cost at times unless there’s some “eureka” finding or trend they can tout. So what’s a news consumer to do? The best way to figure out just what people are thinking is to take a look at a variety of polling, done over time, and look at the broad mosaic, not just one snapshot.

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The headline from the new Gallup poll may be that trust in the media has edged upwards, but it’s clear some things haven’t changed much.



The good news for the MSM is that a combined 50% of respondents now say they trust the “mass media” a “great deal” or “fair amount.” That’s up from 44% one year ago. Those who distrust the media a “great deal” or “fair amount” is 49%, down from 55% one year ago. The bad news is that those numbers have largely remained unchanged over the past decade.



When asked about the media’s political leanings, 46% believe the media is “too liberal,” 37% say it’s “about right” and 16% say “too conservative.” That is also reflected in findings within the parties. Asked if they have trust in the “mass media,” 69% of Republicans say “very little” or “none at all.” On the same question, 70% of Democrats say a “great deal” or “fair amount.” Among Independents, it’s almost evenly split.

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