Key Documents: Section IV. Data on the Status and Practice of Journalism - Public Opinion

Project for Excellence in Journalism—State of the News Media 2008: Public Attitudes

By Robert Ruby and the Project for Excellence in Journalism

Ask the public for its opinion of the press, and the responses are chastening.

Most Americans believe the news media are politically biased, that their stories are often inaccurate and that journalists do not care about the people they report on.

And in 2007, the public's overall view of the press remained by many measures as negative as in the recent past and notably worse than in the mid-1980s.

There are nuances to the public's skepticism. People continue to like what they actually watch, read and know best. They dislike and distrust the hypothetical monolith—the behemoth called the news media.

What is growing is the extent to which partisanship is creating distinct audiences. It has reached the point where ideology is now as strong an indicator of an individual's likes and dislikes about the press as any other basic demographic measure. Increasingly, there are Republican views of the news media and Democratic views, and they differ sharply. Political independents have their own distinct attitudes about the media—and they grew more negative in 2007.

This divide was evident in views of coverage of the war in Iraq. Democrats express greater confidence in the media's performance there than do Republicans.

But the partisan divide is not as sharp when it comes to coverage of the presidential campaign. Nearly everyone tended to think there was too much early handicapping of the race, too little coverage of so-called minor candidates and too little coverage of what the candidates were saying. And those views could deepen given that so much of the press' early handicapping proved wrong—the writing off of John McCain and Mike Huckabee, the love affair with Fred Thompson and the advance anointing of Hillary Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani.

Another worry is that the Internet news audience is particularly skeptical—and this is a group that is growing, is younger and is better educated than the general population. It is the press' future base. This audience is especially critical of the mainstream media's fairness and accuracy.

And the rise of blogging has added to this perception. Bloggers on both the right and left acidly criticized mainstream news outlets for their coverage of politics in 2007 and the war in Iraq. Newspapers, magazines and television duly reported the bloggers' criticisms. (One wire service headline declared, “The blogs flunk the media again.”1 Online editors meanwhile apologized for instances of inaccurate reporting on their Web sites.

One other factor probably added to the mix: the host of growing problems in newsrooms.

In every part of the industry, journalists themselves experienced the turmoil generated by another year of reorganizations and cutbacks. New owners took control of several major news organizations, including Dow Jones & Co. (publisher of the Wall Street Journal) and the Tribune Company (publisher of the Los Angeles Times, [Page 1824]the Chicago Tribune, Newsday and other major newspapers). Anyone paying attention to what the press reported about itself could have detected the insecurity. As the industry is buffeted by new technology and as audiences fragment further, some critics portray the turbulence as confirmation of what they see as the press' failings.

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