Biased And Loving It

Record numbers of people say they don't trust the news media, according to a fresh survey by the Pew Research Center.

From the survey:

Just 29% of Americans say that news organizations generally get the facts straight, while 63% say that news stories are often inaccurate. In the initial survey in this series about the news media’s performance in 1985, 55% said news stories were accurate while 34% said they were inaccurate. That percentage had fallen sharply by the late 1990s and has remained low over the last decade.

Similarly, only about a quarter (26%) now say that news organizations are careful that their reporting is not politically biased, compared with 60% who say news organizations are politically biased. And the percentages saying that news organizations are independent of powerful people and organizations (20%) or are willing to admit their mistakes (21%) now also match all-time lows.

The survey also points out that Republicans are harder on the press than Democrats, although that figure is narrowing.

My line of work gets one of the few roses:

Views of local TV news continue to be less partisan than opinions of other leading news sources. As was the case in 1985, there is very little difference between the views of Republicans (79% favorable) and Democrats (77%); somewhat fewer independents (67%) rate local TV news favorably.

The Pew survey doesn't address the why of declining trust, but let me offer you an educated guess: talk radio, particularly conservative talk radio, which has been growing as trust in traditional news media has slid.

For years, right-leaning talkmeisters have been telling you how rotten and biased the "liberal media" is. And when people tell you that for years, you're eventually going to believe it. Not that we don't deserve the lumps (and last week's big boo-boo involving a security threat training exercise in New York City was a big one), but the pronouncement of bias from those who have a less-than-objective agenda reminds me of that journalistic maxim, "consider the source."

Glenn Beck has been digging into the backgrounds of President Obama's czars. His exposure of Van Jones as a 9/11 conspiracy nut with a foul mouth played a major role in Jones' recent departure. He's also dug up FCC Diversity Chairman Mark Lloyd's head-scratching sympathies for Ceasar Chavez. Here are two people who don't need to be advising the president, but let's be clear: Beck isn't conducing this investigation out of an overwhelming desire to tell people the objective truth: he wants these people gone. It just so happens the facts support his cause. And he, unlike the traditional news media, gets to select only those facts he likes. But nobody's going to accuse him of bias. He's biased to the bone and loving every minute of it.

People don't mind. Beck is near the top of the cable news ratings, up there with Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity (minus Alan Colmes), Lou Dobbs, Rachel Maddow, and Keith Olbermann. To be sure, Katie Couric's ratings are still better than O'Reilly's, but the trend shows cable opinion news shows growing and network news shows declining.

We just buried Walter Cronkite and offered him our tributes as the embodiment of what journalism should be. We might as well have buried that concept with him. Let's quit kidding ourselves. People complain about biased newscasts, but guess what they're watching and listening to? I will offer my thesis once again: Bias is in the eye of the beholder. Many complaints of bias on the part of mainstream news organizations are in fact complaints that the news isn't biased in their direction.

And Pew, if you're going to do another of these press trust surveys, start asking more questions. You may find the answers revealing.