The Media Expects
By Callimachus | Related entries in Media, Polls, The War On TerrorismPew Research Center poll on attitudes toward “America’s place in the world.”
Here’s a handful of numbers that jumped out at me:
Percent who believe “efforts to establish a stable democracy in Iraq will succeed”
media: 33
general public: 56Bush’s job rating approval
media: 21
general public: 40
If nothing else it helps explain the great frustration many Americans express toward the legacy media. According to a Gallup poll from late May, only 28 percent of Americans expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in newspapers and TV news. This figure had been stable, holding between 51 and 55 percent from 1997 to 2003.
But there’s a subtler quality to that media expectation of failure. You write news stories based on what happens. But you also, inevitably, write them with an eye to what you expect to happen. Often this expresses itself unconsciously. But rest assured, it will creep in. If things go well in a place you expect them to go poorly in the long term, you’ll write, “despite the overall bad news, and probably only for a little while, things are going well in X.”
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November 25th, 2005 at 4:24 am
Not very surprising really. What percentage of journalists serve in the military? But that criticism is too narrow. How many college educated men volunteer for military service? Sadly, not many. On Thanksgiving, I sat proudly at a table with 2 other vets and 1 active duty soldier on leave from Iraq. Only one of us was college educated.
November 25th, 2005 at 3:03 pm
Could it also be that those in the media have more information at their fingertips, and therefore have a more informed opinion than your regular voter about the direction this country is headed?
I mean, Cal, do you think Iraq is going to be able to establish a democracy? What degree of certainty to do you have given Bush and company seem to want to start pulling out troops and your knowledge of the Iraqi troops readiness? And furthermore, what do you think of Bush’s performance beyond his decision to go to war with Iraq?
Now. do these opinions inform their writing? To some degree, yes. But again, this is all fairly normal stuff. The Michael Yons of the world are influenced too by the groups of men and women they’ve surrounded themselves with and that influences their writing as probably even more so.
Also, could Gallup’s May number be a response to the worsening situation in Iraq, and the realization by many people that the evidence we were presented was wrong? Notice I don’t say misled, but people put a great deal of trust in their leaders to make the right decision, and many now think that Iraq was the wrong decision. I mean, if the satisfaction number with the media has remained steady for that long, what was the BIGGEST factor in the last year? Both you and I know what it is, and I doubt it has anything to do with the “not hearing any good news out of Iraq” meme.
November 25th, 2005 at 4:22 pm
Justin, look at the survey. It is of leaders in the various subgroups. Here’s what it says about who was polled in the media:
Columnists, editors, publishers … the people Chomsky says, and to some degree correctly, set the media agenda.
We’re not talking about the people on the ground in Iraq. No Michael Yons in this survey. But we’re talking about the filters who stand between them and us, and the people who choose which people get to report about Iraq and which don’t (ever wonder why Yon is a freelancer, and why his work is so dramatically different from the AP and NYT?).
Read the post again. The media number didn’t plumet in May. That was the most recent number I could find for it, but it was the same low number it had been since … 2003. Think again.
November 25th, 2005 at 9:17 pm
In addition to members of the media being better informed, they also have a professional prejudice: they like it when bad things happen, because the news is bad things happening. Their bias is less about liberal or conservative and more about a preference for sensation, crisis and scandal. So, while the average Joe hopes things go well, the average reporter kind of hopes everything goes to hell.
As for public attitudes toward the media, I think they’ve been influenced by genuine media failures, but even more by relentless politically-motivated attacks on the media from professional politicians, the self-interested attacks from talk radio, and the self-justifying and often churlish attacks from the blogosphere. The MSM is everyone’s whipping boy. It amounts to something like a billion dollar negative ad campaign — thousands of daily attacks, year after year, most of them nonsense. And like any negative attack campaign, some of the mud sticks. The negatives are driven up, the positives are depressed.
November 25th, 2005 at 11:45 pm
See, this is what think is more responsible for the country’s attitudes about the media. Say that the media sucks often enough and the country will start agreeing with it, especially when the attacks are coming from both sides of blogosphere.
Cal, I realize mine isn’t a very popular opinion in the blogosphere, but I think the media gets it right more often than not and they should get credit for that.
Also, I wasn’t trying to say that the Michael Yons of the world were polled. I’m just saying that if he was, I’m sure he’d have a different opinion because he too is pushing a certain type of story, one of courage in the face of danger. That’s a valid point of view, but it doesn’t represent the whole truth in Iraq.
In the end, I think the media is stuck in a catch 22. If they try to inject a little bit of investigative journalism in their stories, they get accused of bias. If they don’t, they get accused of being too dry.
What to do, then?
November 26th, 2005 at 12:12 am
It’s not investigative journalism if you know what you’re going to find before you start looking.
November 26th, 2005 at 2:27 am
I think the media has forgotten how to get it right. Look at the hurricane coverage. Afterwards, all the bigwigs and pundits were slapping themselves on the back because they finally woke up and questioned authority, and scolded the government and hit that unmissable target of the incompetent FEMA director. It was one big back-slapping fest. Boy-oh-boy, didn’t we do a bang-up job.
So they questioned authority and sure that’s part of the role of the media. But it’s the secondary role. The primary role is to report the facts correctly. And in that regard, the hurricane was a clusterfuck of historic proportions. From recognizing the story was in the levees, npt the storm surge, to reporting the number of dead, to the crazy skein of urban legends that got passed off as facts and one by one have come undone — baby rapes, cannibals, snipers — I am hard pressed to think of a worse media performance. Yet they’re handing out awards to one another over it.
I’m curious about your obsession with M.Y. Every time I write about the media, you bring him up. Perhaps you don’t care for his reporting. I understand it doesn’t jibe with your worldview. I don’t know how much of him you actually read. I get the feeling you think he’s some gung-ho writer. I wouldn’t be recommending him if he was. He’s not “pushing” anything, as far as I can tell, except the stories of the men and women doing the dirty work. The fact that they don’t fit the picture of WP-flinging baby-killers in a Robert Fisk story is perhaps not a reflection on M.Y.’s veracity.
There’s an element of truth in the parodies that just about every anti-anti-war blogger has tried his hand at over the past two years, of how today’s domestic-based media would have reported World War II. Here’s one (not mine):
Different war! you’ll say. Different war! Not fair! Someday I’ll have time to write a post on that, and why every war is different and in someone’s eyes every war is illegitimate (I can show you plenty of arguments, for instance, that the Afghanistan war in 2001 was completely illegal). Who decides which wars get reported as unjust?
Michael, I think there’s a nuance you overlook. Journalism likes BIG stories. Sometimes, a big story can be good news. The fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain was one of the highlights of my journalism career, because I got to put wonderful news on the front page in big headlines every day, about people and places I knew and cared about.
Big news usually is bad, though certainly not always. You have to watch the coverage over time to detect whether the goal is BIG or BAD. I’m sensing a media that is sniffing for bad more than big.
November 26th, 2005 at 8:58 am
Cal:
That’s an interesting distinction between BIG and BAD. “Big” would be the better choice of words.
The bit from Ernie Pyle for CNN is true as far as it goes. But in that same historical era the MSM refused to report on racism, including widespread lynching, and treated black military units with condescension; refused to look into the unconstitutional internment of Americans of Japanese descent; and managed, while they were at it, not to notice that the Holocaust was underway.
Yes, the MSM was more uncritically jingoistic back in the day — although no worse than Fox — but they missed an awful lot that modern media would have seen.
November 27th, 2005 at 2:23 am
The MSM also gave Jack Kennedy a free ride when he would have been roasted alive today. There would have been no “Camelot.”
The media then was blind to its own institutional biases, which were largely those of the broader society. I’ve been in newsrooms long enough to see the passing of the old guard. A journalist in 1960 has nothing in common with a journalist today, in education, cultural background, and temperament.
You could say the media is more aware now. Or you could say it is hyper-aware of its old biases, but unaware of its current ones.
I’m not sure I trust an anti-military media to report a war accurately any more than I trust an anti-football reporter to report the Army-Navy game.
November 28th, 2005 at 1:51 am
Honestly, I don’t think the Liberal biased media argument holds much water, considering the MSM was the primary cheerleader for the Bush administration during his first term.
I think Michael Reynolds had it right. The media is biased towards sensationalism. That’s why they were such cheerleaders for the Iraq war… it’s a golden news opportunity.