Media Bias
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in MediaThis “dead” horse is still kicking, even among journalists.
Editor and Publisher has more…
NEW YORK More than half of newspaper journalists in a recent survey believe an unethical or unprofessional incident occurred in their newsroom within the past five years, while seven out of 10 said they had been accused of bias in the past 12 months, according to a study released today by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.But at least 70% of those polled more often pointed to “factors beyond their control” as the cause of such poor ethical perceptions, rather than their own newspapers’ actions.
More than 30% of respondents, meanwhile, noted problems with sources — anonymous or not — providing misleading or inaccurate information, with the same percentage seeking legal advice on such stories.
The whole thing? Read it? Here.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
May 10th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
I would have read the whole thing, except your link doesn’t seem to be working.
May 10th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
I found a link. I’ll try to post it here, and hope the comment software doesn’t eat it:
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002464944
For quite some time, I’ve felt like MSM was biased toward the left. To some extent, I still do. And at the same time, I sympathize with those who claim “factors beyond their control” contribute to their poor ethical image. I suspect that if I were an honest hard-working journalist, I’d feel the same way.
Now, I should also say that I tend to distrust polls as well. There is so much room for error creep, given the sensitivity of the results to the selection process, the phrasing of the questions, the order in which they are asked, the choice of answers presented, the interpretation of the results, and the reporting of the interpretation.
When I apply this same metric to the journalism process, I find the same potential for error creep in the steps of research, corroboration, fact-checking, analysis, phrasing, timeliness, editing, and headline writing. I feel I wouldn’t be surprised to find that most journalists are just doing the best job they can, and the result merely looks left-leaning due to a sequence of small filters, each innocuous when considered alone.
It’s another reason why I like weblogs. Particularly when it’s just one writer, whose name is clearly displayed. All the steps are still there, but mostly executed by a single person rather than many, and moreover, you tend to go in to blog reading -knowing- to take your grain of salt, and not forgetting to in the way you might when reading WaPo or NYT.