SINthysist
Rural Racist Homophobe
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Stinking Coverage of Pew Poll
Reed Irvine
Aug. 12, 2002
On Aug. 4, the Pew Research Center released the results of a survey of 1,365 adults conducted during the last two weeks of July. It found that the public's opinion of the news media has fallen sharply from the levels attained in November in the wake of the media's excellent coverage of 9/11. The Center's press release said, "As the media's focus has shifted away from terrorism, Americans regard news organizations with the same degree of skepticism as they did in the 1990s."
For anyone interested in accuracy, the most shocking finding was that 56 percent of those surveyed said the media usually report inaccurately, and only 35 percent thought the media usually get the facts straight. What was even worse was that two-thirds of those polled said that the media try to cover up their mistakes, and slightly less than a quarter believed they were willing to admit their errors.
These numbers closely tracked those opinions about bias, with 59 percent saying the media are politically biased and only 26 percent saying they were careful to avoid bias.
Numbers like these should have been very disturbing to editors and producers around the country. They are in a business that claims to provide its customers with reliable, accurate information. When a survey finds that only a little over a third of the public believe they usually get the facts straight and two-thirds of the consumers of their product think that they try to cover up any mistakes, an alarm should go off in newsrooms around the country. Meetings should be called to discuss what they were doing wrong and to figure out what they might do to correct it.
But if the publishers and editors relied on news sources such as the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times news services for their information, they would not even have learned about these disturbing numbers. The AP and the L.A. Times reported that six out of 10 of those polled said the news media were biased, but they said nothing about the large number of those who thought they were inaccurate and tried to cover up their errors.
Refusing to report those embarrassing numbers is one way of being inaccurate – omitting information that many consumers of the news would consider quite important. The editors and producers don't suppress it because they think that it would be of little interest to anyone. They omit it because it is embarrassing to them and they fear its publication might be damaging to their business.
...
The rest is political diatribe, but this is the jist of how a lot of America appearantly feels.
Reed Irvine
Aug. 12, 2002
On Aug. 4, the Pew Research Center released the results of a survey of 1,365 adults conducted during the last two weeks of July. It found that the public's opinion of the news media has fallen sharply from the levels attained in November in the wake of the media's excellent coverage of 9/11. The Center's press release said, "As the media's focus has shifted away from terrorism, Americans regard news organizations with the same degree of skepticism as they did in the 1990s."
For anyone interested in accuracy, the most shocking finding was that 56 percent of those surveyed said the media usually report inaccurately, and only 35 percent thought the media usually get the facts straight. What was even worse was that two-thirds of those polled said that the media try to cover up their mistakes, and slightly less than a quarter believed they were willing to admit their errors.
These numbers closely tracked those opinions about bias, with 59 percent saying the media are politically biased and only 26 percent saying they were careful to avoid bias.
Numbers like these should have been very disturbing to editors and producers around the country. They are in a business that claims to provide its customers with reliable, accurate information. When a survey finds that only a little over a third of the public believe they usually get the facts straight and two-thirds of the consumers of their product think that they try to cover up any mistakes, an alarm should go off in newsrooms around the country. Meetings should be called to discuss what they were doing wrong and to figure out what they might do to correct it.
But if the publishers and editors relied on news sources such as the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times news services for their information, they would not even have learned about these disturbing numbers. The AP and the L.A. Times reported that six out of 10 of those polled said the news media were biased, but they said nothing about the large number of those who thought they were inaccurate and tried to cover up their errors.
Refusing to report those embarrassing numbers is one way of being inaccurate – omitting information that many consumers of the news would consider quite important. The editors and producers don't suppress it because they think that it would be of little interest to anyone. They omit it because it is embarrassing to them and they fear its publication might be damaging to their business.
...
The rest is political diatribe, but this is the jist of how a lot of America appearantly feels.
