GRADING THE MEDIA

Last week, the Pew Center released a study called "News Audiences Increasingly Polarized." If you followed some of the web commentary of the study last week, you would have encountered sentences such as this line from Vodkapundit:

For all intents and purposes, more than half of the populace (everybody except partisan Democrats, and even their numbers for credibility are nothing for most of the press to brag about) has written off the vast majority of the national press. And they're doing so because they believe that the press has written them off.

Roger Simon writes, "No news entity earns much respect," and Andrew Olmstead writes that "the media has a severe credibility gap."

These folks exaggerate a bit, I think. If you look at the actual numbers of the study, especially Section V, you’ll see a somewhat different, more nuanced story. Consider the following question (exact wording from this page):

Q. 23: Now, I'm going to read a list. Please rate how much you think you can BELIEVE each organization I name on a scale of 4 to 1. On this four point scale, "4" means you can believe all or most of what the organization says. "1" means you believe almost nothing of what they say. How would you rate the believability of [X] on this scale of 4 to 1?

And the results are here, in context here. If you add up columns four and three -- people who seem to be giving the media an "A" or a "B," for believability, you get the following results:

60 Minutes: 69%

CNN: 72%

C-SPAN: 65%

Fox News Channel: 63%

Local TV news: 63%

NBC: 65%

ABC: 64%

CBS: 63%

NewsHour: 59%

NPR: 56%

MSNBC: 64%

In other words, among those who believed that they were qualified to judge, significantly more than half of respondents thought that every single media outlet was believable at a level of 3 or 4 in a four point scale. I’d probably answer 3 for most of the items.

So, far from a vast majority of news consumers “writing off” media outlets, most media outlets seem trustworthy much of the time. That’s not too bad, in my book. In fact, I’d actually like to see a little more skepticism of the media – more 3’s, fewer 4’s.

If you're worried about the technique of adding columns to generate a binary result, note that the folks at Pew did this themselves for Q.50, the results of which are reported here (in context here). Q.50 is reported in a binary fashion but asked on a four-point scale (see here.) So we have the interesting phenomenon that a majority agrees that they don't trust the news, but when asked about specific news outlets, majorities seem to find them more trustworthy than not.

This phenomenon is not all that uncommon in public opinion research. Surveys find that people are much more likely to agree that Congress is untrustworthy in the abstract than they are to find that their individual representative is untrustworthy.

One final point. Bloggers are self-interested observers here: the more the "traditional media" appears "written off" by the public, the more one can imagine that blogging provides an important service.

(Link to Vodkapundit from No Left Turns, which also overreaches in its interpretation. I don’t mean to say that the story about political segmentation in the media isn’t interesting, but we should at least take a closer look at what the data actually says. More thoughts on the study can be found here.)