The problem of media in the United States of America

Public confidence in the media, already low, continues to slip. A poll by USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup found only 36 percent of Americans believe news organizations get the facts straight, compared with 54 percent in mid-1989.

According to an in-depth study by the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1999, 23 percent of the public find factual errors in the news stories of their daily paper at least once a week while more than a third of the public - 35 percent - see spelling or grammar mistakes in their newspaper more than once a week.  The study also found that 73 percent of adults in America have become more skeptical about the accuracy of their news.

The level of inaccuracy noticed is even higher when the public has first-hand knowledge of a news story.  Almost 50 percent of the public reports having had first-hand knowledge of a news event at some time even though they were not personally part of the story.  Of that group, only 51 percent said the facts in the story were reported accurately, with the remainder finding errors ranging from misinterpretations to actual errors.

When reporters and editors interviewed in the ASNE study were asked why they thought mistakes were being made, 34 percent said the "rush to deadline" was the major factor, one third said it was a combination of being "overworked" and "understaffed,” and the remaining third said it was "inattention, carelessness, inexperience, poor knowledge" and just-plain-bad editing and reporting.

The Columbia Journalism Review and the nonprofit, nonpartisan research firm Public Agenda polled 125 senior journalists nationwide in 1999 on various questions.  When asked: "Have you ever seriously suspected a colleague of manufacturing a quote or an incident?" a disturbingly high 38 percent answered yes.

In a study by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, eighty percent of the American public said they believe "journalists chase sensational stories because they think it will sell papers, not because they think it is important news. "  Another 85 percent of the public believes that "newspapers frequently over-dramatize some news stories just to sell more papers." Over 80 percent believe sensational stories receive lots of news coverage simply because they are exciting, not because they are important.

78 percent of the public thinks journalists enjoy reporting on the personal failings of private officials.

48 percent of the public sees misleading headlines in their paper more than once a week.

Fully 70 percent of the respondents felt that most news organizations do a "poor" (20 percent) or "fair" (50 percent) job of informing the public about errors in their reporting. Barely a quarter called it "good." A paltry 2 percent awarded a rating of "excellent."

A remarkable 91 percent think newsrooms need more open and candid internal discussion of editorial mistakes and what to do about them.

Almost four in ten of those people interviewed feel sure many factual errors are never corrected because reporters and editors are eager to hide their mistakes.

More than half think most news organizations lack proper internal guidelines for making corrections.

A majority (52 percent) thinks the media needs to give corrections more prominent display.

Over 40 percent said their news organization does not even have a person designated to review and assess requests for corrections.

A study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs found the number of stories about the environment on the network news went from 377 in 1990 and 220 in 1991 to only 106 in 1998 and 131 in 1999.  At the same time, the number of stories about entertainment soared from 134 in 1990 and 95 in 1991, to 221 stories in 1998, and 172 in 1999.

“The Project for Excellence in Journalism, reporting on the front pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, on the ABC, CBS, and NBC Nightly news programs, and on Time and Newsweek, showed that from 1977 to 1997, the number of stories about government dropped from one in three to one in five, while the number of stories about celebrities rose from one in every 50 stories to one in every 14.  What difference does it make? Well, it's government that can pick our pockets, slap us into jail, run a highway through our backyard or send us to war. Knowing what government does is “the news we need to keep our freedoms.”

- Bill Moyers

The reporting on national affairs by the major newsmagazines has declined by 25 percent, while the number of entertainment and celebrity stories has doubled, according to "The State of the News Media in 2004” report by the non-partisan Project for Excellence in Journalism.

At the Rio Earth Summit the world’s industrialized nations agreed to fix international aid at 0.7 percent of GDP. The only countries to reach that target have been the Scandinavian countries. The US ranks at the very bottom with a pathetic 0.14 percent.  A sizeable amount of our aid is political in nature and does not go toward benefiting people in need.  Even when private donations are included in the mix, our country still ranks at the bottom in total giving per capita.

According to the World Health Organization about 28,000 people who die every day around the world could be saved easily with basic care. In all, last year 8.8 million lives were lost needlessly (approximately the combined number of people living in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine) due to preventable diseases, infections and child birth complications. 
When Americans are asked what percentage of the GDP for international aid would be reasonable, the answers range from 1 percent to 5 percent. Similarly, when asked what percentage of the federal budget should go to foreign aid, Americans on average said 14 percent, and that in fact, they thought 20 percent was currently being allocated. The actual amount of our budget allocated is 1 percent.
Yet the press rarely reports on any of the above – that we give so little, that we are avoiding what we agreed to, that Americans think giving at a higher level would be reasonable, that we think we are giving far more than we are, and that a huge number of deaths every day (eight times the number that died in the 9-11 attacks), are a direct result of not receiving basic care.  When the press does report on foreign aid, the media often perpetuates the myth that we give substantially and in proportion to our means.

Large numbers of Americans give low ratings to the media for school coverage.  For example, in a joint survey by the Education Writers Association and the Public Agenda, 44 percent gave “print media with a national readership” ratings of fair to poor, while only 4 percent gave a rating of excellent.  About 84 percent gave “broadcast media with a national audience” ratings of fair to poor and only 1 percent gave a rating of excellent. Educators and journalists agreed.  Over 44 percent of journalists rated “print media with a national readership” as fair to poor in their coverage and 84 percent rated “broadcast media with a national audience” the same.

Anthony Downs of the Brookings Institution in the 1970’s began observing what he called “the issue attention cycle” in the American media.  The cycle is:  the news media and public ignore a serious problem for years; for some reason, they suddenly notice, declare it a crisis and concoct a solution; next they realize the problem will not be easily fixed and will be costly; they grow angry, then bored; finally, they resume ignoring the problem.

Here is an example from research done by Laura Haniford of the University of Michigan. Haniford focused on the news media's coverage of the racial achievement gap — the difference between how whites and blacks score on standardized tests.

She found that from 1984 to 1995, The Ann Arbor News published 11 articles on the achievement gap in local schools; then suddenly, in 1997, 92 achievement-gap articles appeared; then, gap coverage virtually disappeared again, plummeting to two articles in 2001. What amazed her was that during that entire period the achievement gap remained substantial and virtually unchanged.

Of the roughly 1,500 daily newspapers in the U.S., “Only a handful—at most a dozen, including The [Washington] Post—actually have a reporter who covers the press full-time as a beat. What critical reporting exists, though at times is refreshingly good, it is for the most part timid and superficial. About 15 papers have an ombudsman on staff to respond to readers' complaints. When it comes to looking at itself, society's watchdog is a lamb,” according to Sydney Schanberg, one of the most respected journalists of this era, he has been a reporter for The New York Times for more than twenty-five years, and recipient of many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize.

Schanberg adds: It's no secret that journalism in America has become more slipshod and reckless, at times promiscuous.... Every journalist surely also knows that the old-time standards...have been weakened if not discarded.  Most of us in the business, however, stand by as mere observers....

If this were happening in any other profession or power center in American life, the media would be all over the story, holding the offending institution up to a probing light. When law firms breach ethical canons, Wall Street brokerages cheat clients or managed-care companies deny crucial care to patients, we journalists consider it news and frequently put it on the front page.  But when our own profession is the offender, we go soft.
By failing to cover ourselves, we have made ourselves complacent, virtually assured that because we are not likely to be scrutinized by our peers, we are safe in our careless or abusive practices.”

Renee Ferguson of WMAQ in Chicago said the unwillingness on the part of the media to monitor itself is amongst the reasons behind an increasing problem of plagiarism among print and broadcast reporters.  “I suspect we all know examples at own our stations and papers where things like the Blair incident have happened,” Ferguson said. “Are we prepared to investigate ourselves?”

Geneva Overholser (former Editor of The Des Moines Register and board member of the Pulitzer Prize Board and American Society of Newspaper Editors) describing in 1990 a list of factors rapidly eroding the quality of reporting, said, “There is the fact that newspaper corporations typically retain truly remarkable profit margins: 30 percent is not unusual and the metro average has been somewhere around 17 percent. That's 17 cents on every dollar made as profit for the company, yet the average beginning salary for a newspaper reporter last year was $17,000.”

Current data supports Overholser’s assertions.  In October, 2003, for example, Gannett Co. Inc., one of the nation's largest newspaper chains, reported for the first nine months of 2003 profits of $853.2 million on revenues of $4.89 billion, a profit margin of 17.4 percent.  In the same month, the E.W. Scripps Co., owner of another chain of daily newspapers, reported quarterly profits of $60.9 million for the company's newspapers on revenues of $164 million, a profit margin of 37 percent.

“Citizens are asking journalists and media critics why the media don't ‘do something’ to discover and publish ‘the truth.’

…. As a loyal American, trained as a journalist some 45 years ago, I am convinced that journalists in the U.S. feel increasingly trapped between their professional values and the marketing/profits mentality so evident now everywhere in the news industry. The old professional values urge them to dig, investigate and bring to the light of day the relevant facts and issues, while the market/profit mentality asks, ‘Is it worth it? Do enough people care?’
It seems clear enough that the market/profit mentality has won out, especially in electronic news, and to a considerable extent in the print media. ... Meanwhile, the push for corporate profit margins much higher than those of average American businesses goes on — with 40 to 100 percent in the electronic media and 12 to 45 percent in the print media common during 2003.”
- Margaret T. Gordon, a professor of news media and public policy at the Evans School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington and formerly the dean of the school, in a Seattle Times column August 08, 2003.

The American public agrees with Overholser and Gordon.  In an in-depth by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 59 percent of Americans said newspapers are concerned mainly with making profits rather than serving the public interest.