Study Warns of Junk-News Diet

More Americans are getting information from blogs and cable TV, which tend
to stress opinions, not reporting, a survey says.

By James Rainey, Times Staff Writer

American consumers confront an ever-broader river of news from myriad
sources, but the standard for gathering and presenting the information
tends to be “faster, looser and cheaper” than in the past, according to a
survey of the news business to be released today by a media watchdog group.

Internet blogs and cable TV programs have led the trend toward a
“journalism of assertion” that relies less on reporting than personal
opinion, reported the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which is
affiliated with Columbia University.

That trend makes it more important for journalists “to document the
reporting process more openly so that audiences can decide for themselves
whether to trust it,” the organization concluded in its annual report.

On two of the top media stories of 2004, newspapers, magazines, radio,
television and the Internet merited a mixed verdict, the study found.

On one hand, the study’s review of 250 randomly selected stories buttressed
the complaint that President Bush got worse coverage than Sen. John F.
Kerry in the 2004 presidential race. Coverage of the war in Iraq, on the
other hand, tended to be far more neutral than some critics had charged
with 2,200 stories containing roughly an even mix of positive, negative and
neutral accounts.

The second annual report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which
is based in Washington, focused more on trends and prospects than on
content. The considerable change facing the industry is revealed in a few
facts: Online advertising has increased 30% to almost $10 billion in one
year and estimated readership of blogs has increased 58% in six months.
About 32 million Americans say they have obtained information from the Web
logs, or journals, known as blogs.

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the research project, said that with the growth
in Internet commentary, the culture of opinion journalism has expanded
exponentially. Blogging has its value  exposing, the report said, hasty
reporting by CBS News on memos that referred to Bush’s military service
during the Vietnam War. But it can also lead the public astray, the report
found, such as when it fomented the “unfounded conspiracy theory” that
Republicans stole the presidential election in Ohio.

Rather than taking the time to gather and scrutinize each piece of
information  the model for the mainstream media  the report said some
bloggers hewed to another philosophy: “Publish anything, especially points
of view, and the reporting and verification will occur afterward in the
response of fellow bloggers.”

Although the traditional media continue to have struggles of their own, the
public’s view of the believability of news organizations has stabilized
somewhat in the last two years, according to the study, which relied on
research by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. About 35%
of Americans said the media get the facts straight.

Only better reporting and increased transparency about its tactics will
help the media regain credibility, the study concluded.

“Since citizens have a deeper range of information at their fingertips, the
level of proof in the press must rise accordingly,” it said. “In effect,
the era of trust-me journalism has passed and the era of show-me journalism
has begun.”

For its analysis of media content in 2004, the study team partnered with
researchers at four universities to review coverage of two big stories and
other trends.

The presidential race

Days were randomly selected from throughout the race to profile the
equivalent of one month of coverage. Two hundred and fifty stories were
then dissected. Any that had twice as many positive comments as negative
ones were deemed “positive” and the reverse for negative references. The
review found 36% of the stories about Bush to be negative, compared with
12% negative about Kerry. It found 20% positive stories about Bush,
compared with less than 30% positive about his Democratic challenger.

The study did not try to assess whether the outcome reflected partisan bias
against the Republican Bush, a tendency to view incumbents more harshly, or
some other cause.

The war in Iraq

Using a similar methodology on 2,187 stories, the study found reporting of
the conflict had slightly more stories with a clearly negative tone than
stories with a clearly positive tone  25% negative, compared to 20%
positive. The largest number, 35%, had no decided tone and another 20% were
on multiple subjects with no apparent tilt.

Newspaper coverage most closely mirrored that balance, while Fox had the
most pronounced slant. The cable TV outlet aired twice as many positive as
negative pieces about the war.

That finding may be partly related to a larger tendency at Fox on all kinds
of stories that allows on-air personalities to offer their personal
opinions. Seven out of 10 Fox stories reviewed in the study included
opinions not attributed to reporting. That happened in less than one of 10
CNN stories and in less than one of three stories aired on MSNBC.

Rosenstiel linked the opinionated nature of Fox programs partly to big-name
personalities such as Bill O’Reilly, whose programs are built largely
around his musings. But even field reporters on the network employ a
colloquial style. In one instance, a Fox journalist expressed hope that
Iraqi forces, rather than Americans, capture a terrorism suspect. In
another, a reporter speculated that Martha Stewart might want to buy back
her company’s stock.

Despite the many issues raised about the media’s reliability and challenges
in holding audiences (newspaper readership dropped again in 2004 and the
audience for cable television stopped growing), the mainstream media
continued to be a big moneymaker.

Corporations have been slow, however, to fold that money back into
newsgathering. The number of editorial employees at American newspapers
shrank by 500 in the most recent year studied. Local TV stations employ
fewer news people than they did in the boom economy of 2000.

The study found surprising the lack of investment in websites devoted to
news; 62% of those working for Internet news outlets said their newsrooms
had suffered cuts in the last three years, far greater than the 37% of news
people at traditional outlets who said their staffs had been cut.

The reductions came despite the spiraling Internet audience and seemed tied
to a larger trend in American journalism that emphasizes “prepackaging and
presenting information, not  gathering it,” the study concluded.

The study recommended that news consumers, like dieters, become more
discerning.

“The real crisis may be news obesity,” the study said, “consuming too
little that can nourish citizens and too much that can bloat them.”