The credibility crisis
: Journalism’s credibility crisis keeps growing. From a transcript of tonights’s PBS Newhour sent to me by their PR, Andrew Kohut of the Pew Center says:
When we first started our People in the Press series, we asked people, a representative sample: Does the media usually get the facts straight, or do they often get it wrong? And we found, I think we have a slide on this, we found 55 percent then saying that media usually gets the story right. The 55 percent was defined as a very low number and it was a shockingly low number. But over the years, that number has gotten lower and lower.
And at this point in time, we have a majority of people saying the media usually gets it wrong, and only 36 percent saying the media usually gets it — the facts straight….
Back in the 1988 campaign, 58 percent said there was no media bias in the reporting. That number slowly slipped down over the course of the ’90s. We got to this campaign. It was only 38 percent, both Republicans and Democrats increasingly critical and skeptical about how fairly the media is doing campaign coverage.
Frightening stats, eh?
Kenneth Smith, the interviewer, tries to blame that on Fox. But in his opening spiel of news sins, it was The New York Times, CBS News, and USA Today that were listed, not Fox. Smells like media bias about media bias to me. Closed loop.
Then Ken Auletta says, with not a hint of irony:
I think if you watch, say cable television, you see reporters moving out of their normal job as reporters to become what I would call bloviators, and so what you have is people watching them and saying, wait a second, they’re not reporters, they’re just expressing opinions, so how can I trust them?
Hmmm: A reporter bloviating about reporters bloviating. (And, yes, here I am bloviating about the bloviator bloviating on bloviating. I’m exhausted, how about you? More closed loops.)
