“There’s a kind of self-fulfilling perception to it,” said Robert Lichter, a pioneering media-bias researcher who heads the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University. “Once people see something they don’t like, they notice things that reinforce the belief that there’s bias” in the media as a whole.
l There are more watchdog groups focused on rooting out media bias.
Long ago, a few watchdog groups, such as the conservative AIM (Accuracy in Media) and its more liberal counterpart FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), kept an eye on reporters’ work. Nowadays, not just politicians criticize the media for their alleged bias; an entire cottage industry exists to highlight the media’s alleged failings. This includes ideological outfits such as Media Matters for America and the Media Research Center; the satirical “Daily Show” and “Colbert Report”; and blogs by the hundreds.
All that scrutiny of the press may suggests an inescapable conclusion: There’s something wrong with the news media. All the time.
Journalists have gotten that message, too. “Reporters have heard the criticism from the right so often that they lean over backwards to be fair to them,” said Eric Alterman, a journalist, college professor and the author of the best-selling “What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News.”
l In the public’s mind, “the news media” encompasses the kitchen sink.
Few people make a distinction between news reporting — which attempts to play it straight — and opinion-mongering, which is designed to provoke and persuade. Tellingly, when asked what they think of when they hear the phrase “news organization,” the majority of respondents (63 percent) in Pew’s news-bias survey cited “cable news,” and specifically Fox News and CNN. But while cable news networks do some straightforward reporting, their most popular programs, by far, are those in which opinionated hosts ask opinionated guests to sling opinions about the day’s news.
“A big part of the conversation on cable is [people] telling you how the rest of the media is getting the story wrong,” said Mark Jurkowitz, a former press critic and newspaper ombudsman who is now associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a Washington-based research group affiliated with Pew. That, he noted, is likely to sow more doubt about the media’s integrity or accuracy.
Of course, reporters have helped blur the very lines they want the public to respect, Lichter said, by writing up news stories and then appearing on TV or going on social media to tell people what to think about their stories.
“The modern way [for journalists] is to be edgy and opinionated and to call attention to yourself,” Lichter said.
l We know more and can second-guess.
Thanks to technology, people have more access to more sources of news than before. Which means they can check several accounts of the same event. This can create its own kind of suspicion; savvy readers often ask reporters why they ignored or played down facts that another reporter emphasized.
l People believe their preferred news sources are objective and fair, while the other guy’s are biased.
Pew’s research suggests that people think the other guy’s media are spreading lies while one’s own are, relatively, a paragon of truth.
A clear majority (66 percent) say news organizations in general are “often inaccurate.” But the figure drops precipitously (to 30 percent) when people are asked the same question about the news organization “you use most.” Jurkowitz said this is the analogue of how people feel about Congress — most give low marks to lawmakers in general, but they vote to reelect their incumbent representative more than 90 percent of the time.
“If you watch the Channel 2 newscast night after night, you trust the people on the air,” he said. “The mere fact that you’re a habituated user makes you think better of them.”
Despite the low esteem the public seems to hold for “the news media,” the good news may be that it’s all relative. Pew found last year that people said they trusted information from the news media more than any other source, including state governments, the Obama administration, federal government agencies, corporations and Congress.
The lowest degree of trust? By far, people named “candidates running for office.”
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