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.”

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How do we feel about the mainstream media? Sort of how Jack Nicholson said in “A Few Good Men.”

Deep down in places we don't talk about, we want them on that wall. We need them on that wall … Or so a new study suggests.

A survey out of Massachusetts research firm on confidence levels of media consumers alleges that while ObamaGirl may be a nice diversion and blogs can drive some debates, participants trust print media about 5 times more than online options like YouTube, blogs, alternative media or the candidates’ own websites. According to the study, newspapers are seen as credible by 56 percent of participants, as opposed to the "new" media options, which hover around 10 percent. The study's summary begins:

As the 6-month race to the first presidential primaries begins, much attention has focused on some candidates’ presence on the Internet. Obama Girl, Hillary Clinton’s spoof on the Sopranos, and the various sites covering the candidates and campaigns has some traditional media worried about their Internet investment strategy. When Nucleus Research and KnowledgeStorm undertook a survey of 383 people to better understand the impact and effectiveness of streaming media in political campaigning, it found the buzz about Internet influence – at least at this point in the campaign – was much ado about nothing.

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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.

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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.”

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Sunday's "60 Minutes" report on the Medicare prescription drug bill and the lobbying and politics associated with it, which you can watch by clicking on the video box, has come in for criticism from a conservative group called The National Center For Public Policy Research.

In a press release, the Center criticizes "60 Minutes" for relying on a report (PDF) from the group Families USA. It claims the report falsely exaggerated Medicare drug prices because its data come from two relatively affluent counties.

"60 Minutes" producer Ira Rosen, who produced the segment, told me he stands by the story, saying that "Families USA data is represented nationally." I also spoke to Families USA Executive Director Ron Pollack. Pollack told me that "the major plans that are providing prescription drug coverage are national plans. And the price data are similar from one area to another. If we literally did every county, we'd never get a report out. So what we've done is taken areas that we thought are representative – and checked to make sure that was true."

"Whenever we issue information like this, we know very well that this is going to be examined carefully," he added. "The drug lobby – PhRMA – has not criticized our data at all." PhRMA has criticized Family USA's decision to use the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs as a point of comparison, however, arguing that the VA system is fill of deficiencies. "60 Minutes" made the same comparison.

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Last Thursday night, Vaughn and I hit Washington DC's Grand Hyatt hotel for the Media Research Center "DisHonors Awards." The Media Research Center is a conservative media criticism outfit – it bills itself as "The Leader in Documenting, Exposing and Neutralizing Liberal Media Bias" – and the Dishonors Awards is their annual gala, a roast of "the Most Outrageously Biased Liberal Reporters of 2005."

We descended into the bowels of the hotel around 7 pm, just as the event was starting, and were soon directed to the press table, which was in the back corner of an enormous hall. The press table wasn't full, but I did make some friends there, among them Ian Schwartz, the 18-year-old conservative blogger behind such sites as firedavidgregory.com. Also at my table were David Lat, who co-edits Wonkette, Greg Pierce, who writes the Inside Politics column for the Washington Times, and Mary Katherine Ham, who blogs over at Hugh Hewitt's site. (Here's Ian's write-up of the festivities, and here's Mary Katherine's.) Other mediafolk in attendance were Jeff Gannon, aka James Guckert, the former Talon News White House reporter whose personal and professional life became a major media story last year, and National Review Online's Kathryn Jean Lopez, known to her fans as K-Lo, though both managed to secure better tables than I did. [NOTE: As it turns out, K-Lo did not attend. We were told by a media rep that she was there -- he even told us what table! -- but apparently she couldn't make it. My apologies.]

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The Media Research Center released a report this week about how the mainstream media are "Covering Saddam’s Shenanigans, Not His Crimes." The MRC reviewed every mention of the Saddam trial on the network nightly newscasts between October 16 and March 15 and "found the networks spent nearly three times as much airtime on Saddam’s courtroom antics as on the serious testimony of his victims," according to Rich Noyes.

A few points about this. First, there doesn't seem to be much doubt about Saddam's guilt at this point. There have been many news reports about Saddam's time in power in Iraq, and it's pretty clear to almost all observers that he's responsible for some truly horrendous crimes. That's not to say Saddam does not deserve a trial. Even the worst criminals do. But from a news perspective, focusing on the evidence seems less important because many of his crimes have already been well documented.

At the same time, one could argue that what Saddam did – not his antics – are the real story here. There is something to that argument – I don't think anyone could claim that his crimes are less important or significant than his courtroom outbursts. But it shouldn't come as a surprise that his antics are what's getting most of the attention. Saddam is a compelling figure, one who has existed mostly at a distance for a long time, and the trial offers the best opportunity most Americans have ever had to see what he's really like.

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Each week we invite someone from outside PE to weigh in with their thoughts about CBS News and the media at large. This week we turned to Tim Graham, Director of Media Analysis for the Media Research Center. From his conservative media watchdog perch, Graham (a frequent commenter on Public Eye) answers some of the questions he's often asked, and gives his take on the differences between right and left media critics. As always, the opinions expressed and factual assertions made in “Outside Voices” are those of the author, not ours, and we seek a wide variety of voices. Take it away, Tim:

If a conservative were to start a career in the field of politics with the goal of gaining maximum exposure in the "mainstream media," probably the last thing he or she would do is sign up with a conservative media watchdog group. Conservatives of a certain pre-Internet vintage knew it was hard enough getting your name in the paper without picking a fight with the media giants. But since Public Eye was kind enough to solicit this "outside voice," let’s explore a few questions we are often asked:

1. Are you anti-journalist? Left-wing media-watch groups like Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting make a show of how they’re "pro-journalist," as if we at the MRC are not. Surely, Dan Rather is not on our Most Admired list. But we have a deep, geeky love of the news. Several of us can remember being grade-school age and watching Vietnam stories with ‘VIA SATELLITE’ graphics on screen, when the technology was new and exciting. At 17, I was a little late for my dishwashing job the night Walter Cronkite did his last newscast.

We know the value of reporting done right, but we also warn of the harm of reporting done wrong. We’re media critics in part because we’re angered by media unfairness, inaccuracy and even injustice in reporting on our ideas and our think tanks, on our political leaders and our historical heroes, on our religious faiths and our traditional family upbringings. But the great majority of what we watch and read is not noticeably unfair or inaccurate. If we were asked the recent CBS poll question, "How often do the news media tell the truth," we would answer "most of the time." So much of the news our patient analysts review every day is focused on subjects without earth-shaking political impact: who won at the Olympics, wildfires and church arsons, low-fat diets and teenage alcohol consumption, missing white girls and Britney Spears neglecting to belt up her baby. We don’t suspect the networks are twisting or omitting facts for a political agenda in these hours.

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We're exploring audience research this week at Public Eye, and today we reveal the statistics that help dictate which stories make it onto the morning shows, and when.



Ever wonder why the morning shows do more straightforward news early and soft features towards the end of the program? The answer has a lot to do with demographics. Below you'll find the weekday Adult Audience Profile for the three network morning news programs, broken down by half-hour, courtesy of Rob Schlaepfer, CBS vice president of news research and program planning:

               Percent of Adult (18+) Audience

 	Adults 18+  Women 18+  Men 18+ Adults 25-54  Adults 55+
7:00 AM	 100%	    65%        35%     54%           43%
7:30 AM	 100%	    66%        34%     49%           48%
8:00 AM	 100%	    67%        33%     45%           52%
8:30 AM	 100%	    68%        32%     43%           54%

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Yesterday, Public Eye offered a brief history of audience research in the news, drawn largely from an interview with CBS researcher David Poltrack. Today we look at the techniques researchers use to predict what the audience wants, and how big a role research plays in shaping editorial decisions in the news.



One of the regular complaints of media critics is that certain important stories don't get enough coverage. Take the situation in strife-torn Darfur, in western Sudan. Journalists came late to the conflict, even after thousands were killed. And that's if they came at all. "Normally Africa gets the short end of the stick [when it comes to news coverage]," says Andrew Tyndall, who analyzes network news at The Tyndall Report. "The dominance of Iraq compounds that."



But why don't we cover both Sudan and Iraq? Well, one contributing reason may be that researchers believe people don't care about international news unless it clearly relates to them. (It's worth noting here that at the network level, most people on the editorial side will tell you that research has little impact on the final product.) Iraq has an obvious American angle, but stories out of Africa, like the situation in Sudan, the battle against poverty, and the devastation caused by AIDS, do not. People would tune out, Poltrack says, if the nightly newscasts led with a story about Sudan. Journalists may find the topic newsworthy, he argues, but the American pubic thinks otherwise. "It is not considered by most people to be not particularly relevant to them," he says. "That is unfortunate, but it is true. It doesn't tie back to their life. It doesn't affect them directly. So that's a very tough sell."



How does Poltrack know this? For one thing, he can look at the ratings: Neilson now breaks ratings down minute by minute, so analysts can see exactly when an audience tunes out. But researchers aren't just reactive. They also use quantitative and qualitative analyses to gauge peoples' interest before a program airs. At CBS' facility at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, where much of CBS' research goes on, citizens are asked for their reactions to programming. (In case you're wondering why the facility is in Vegas, Poltrack says you get a broad cross section of people from across the country there, most of whom don't have anything to do during the day.) One technique researchers use to get these reactions is to have viewers turn dials in a positive or negative direction depending on whether they like what they're seeing at the moment. Of course, this technique is far more effective when it comes to entertainment programs than news. After all, if you see an extraordinarily sad report from New Orleans, one that packs a strong emotional punch, how do you decide which way to turn the dial?

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