Study finds people want wider role for press
NEW YORK – A study of the public's attitude toward the press reveals that distrust goes deeper than partisanship and down to how journalists define their very mission.
In short: Americans want more than a watchdog.
The study, released Wednesday by the Media Insight Project, a collaboration between the American Press Institute and The Associated PRESS-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, suggests ways that news organizations can reach people they may be turning off now.
“In some ways, this study suggests that our job is broader and bigger than we've defined it,” said Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute.
The study defines five core principles or beliefs that drive most journalists: keep watch on public officials and the powerful; amplify voices that often go unheard; society works better with information out in the open; the more facts people have, the closer they will get to the truth; and it's necessary to spotlight a community's problems to solve them.
Yet the survey, which asked nonjournalists a series of questions designed to measure support for each of those ideas, found unqualified majority support for only one of them. Twothirds of those surveyed fully supported the fact-finding mission.
Half of the public embraced the principle that it's important for the media to give a voice to the less powerful, according to the survey, and slightly less than half fully supported the roles of oversight and promoting transparency.
Fewer than a third of the respondents agreed completely with the idea that it's important to aggressively point out problems. Only 11% of the public, most of them liberals, offered full support to all five ideas.
“I do believe they should be a watchdog on the government, but I don't think they should lean either way,” said Annabell Hawkins, 41, a stay-at-home mother from Lawton, Oklahoma. “When I grew up watching the news, it seemed pretty neutral. You'd get either side. But now it doesn't seem like that.”
Hawkins said she believed the news media spent far too much time criticizing former President Donald Trump and rarely gave him credit for anything good he did while in office.
“I just want the facts about what happened so I can make up my own mind,” said Patrick Gideons, a 64-year-old former petroleum industry supervisor who lives south of Houston. He lacks faith in the news media because he believes they offer too much opinion.
Gideons, though, said he gets most of his news through social media, which is skilled in directing followers toward beliefs they are comfortable with. He said he knows only one person who subscribes to a newspaper anymore – his 91-year-old father.
Polls show how the public's attitude toward the press has soured over the past 50 years and, in this century, how it has become much more partisan. In 2000, a Gallup poll found 53% of Democrats said they trusted the media, compared with 47% of Republicans. In the last full year of the Trump presidency, Gallup found trust went up to 73% among Democrats and plunged to 10% among Republicans.
The survey's findings point to some ways news organizations can combat the negativity.
Half a century ago, when newspapers were flourishing and before the internet and cable television led to an explosion in opinionated news, the public's view of the role of journalists was more compatible to how journalists viewed the job themselves, Rosenstiel said.
“We were the tough guys, we were the cops,” he said.
The nationwide survey was conducted with 2,727 adults in the fall of 2019, with a second set of interviews done last August with 1,155 people who had completed the first survey.