Monday, August 13, 2007

According to Study, the Mainstream Media's Losing It

This story at Ars Technica confirms what I've always believed about the mainstream media (MSM): it's biased, unprofessional, uninformed, anti-American, and no longer serves its mission as protector of America's Constitutional Republic. At least, as a recent Pew study shows, most Americans would agree with me.

Some interesting items:

This, however, doesn't mean that the public isn't keeping up with drinking a tall glass of press "hatorade." Pew notes that, since 1985, the public generally sees the mainstream press as doing an increasingly bad job at remaining moral, protecting democracy, and avoiding bias. Only 39 percent of Americans surveyed felt that the media managed to get the facts straight, compared to 46 percent in 2001 and 55 percent in 1985. "As a consequence, the believability ratings for individual news organizations are lower today than they were in the 1980s and 1990s," writes the report. Americans also feel that the press is less professional than it was in 1985, with 66 percent of survey respondents describing the press as professional compared to 72 percent (although there was a particularly low dip to 49 percent in July of 2002).

The Internet crowd feels even more strongly:

The Internet news audience is even more critical of news organizations as a whole. "The internet news audience is particularly likely to criticize news organizations for their lack of empathy, their failure to 'stand up for America,' and political bias," reads the report. "Roughly two-thirds (68%) of those who get most of their news from the internet say that news organizations do not care about the people they report on, and 53% believe that news organizations are too critical of America." Comparatively, only 53 percent of the general public believes that news organizations don't care about the people they report on, and 43 percent believes that they're too critical of America.

And then, of course, there's the partisan line:

But there's another set of data lurking below the surface that is taking its toll on these numbers. It's no secret that Republicans and Democrats feel differently—and, in some cases, very strongly—over exactly how biased and accurate the mainstream media is, and Pew's data reflects this. For example, almost three times as many Republicans (63 percent) say that the press is too critical of America compared to Democrats (23 percent), "and there is virtually no measure of press values or performance on which there is not a substantial gap in the views of partisans," Pew found.

This is an important study. I wonder how well the MSM will cover the Pew results.

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