More News about the News: Blog 7

Over the last five years or so, it seems impossible to hear or engage in a conversation about the state of the news media without the mention of the rise in network news programs that cater to partisan party-politics and outrageous network pundits such as Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh. The argument is that, with the multitude of choices the new media landscape provides or promises to provide, people will begin seeking out news that caters only to their political bent. The third part of the Pew Research Center’s latest study, however, seems less concerned. It finds that “a large majority of the public continues to say that they prefer getting news from sources that don’t have a particular point of view…Only about a quarter (23%) say they prefer getting news that shares their point of view.”

In my estimation, the explanation and discussion provided by Pew concerning these numbers doesn’t go far enough. Yes, we’ve had O’Reilly and Coulter and Limbaugh blabbering on the Fox network for awhile now, but the Pew Research Center fails to measure the blogosphere’s impact on the partisan news “phenomenon.” However, given the Pew Center’s findings in the “Public’s Knowledge” part of the study, it makes sense that this isn’t a concern: If only 4 in 10 people can name Condoleezza Rice as the current secretary of state and even fewer can name Vladimir Putin as the leader of Russia, as the study finds, this is a far bigger problem than those who seek out news on partisan party-politics lines. To alter an old cliché, no news is much worse than possibly slanted news.

The other part of Pew’s findings that confuses me is their “concern” about the growing number of people who only have cell phones and not land phones. It didn’t occur to me until the disclaimer at the end of this section, where it states “the cell-only trend has not yet seriously undermined public opinion polls that use the random digit dialing method” that this was significant because it might present a problem in conducting this important market research in the future. I am among those who use only a cell phone, a characteristic I suspect I share with many of my college peers. For this reason, I’m glad that the demographic is being addressed in terms of studies such as the ones conducted by the Pew Research Center.

Another part of the “attitudes” section of the study that resonated with my own experiences and that of my peers is the claim that there is a “lack of time to follow the news” and “lack of background information with which to interpret the news.” As someone who follows both the news and its trends relatively closely, I may roll my eyes when I hear these “excuses,” but I remember a time when I may have used them myself. In all honesty, daily news consumption has become a habit of mine only within the last few years. I find it’s sort of like going to the gym: I may dread the thought of having to squeeze it into everything else I have to do, but I find that once I do it, I enjoy it and feel much better after I’m “cleansed” with information. I also would argue that the best journalists include “background information” and context in their stories, and that context comes with time and effort put into understanding the issues in the news. That’s not to say that all news outlets should write for an eighth-grader (as they tell you to do in basic newswriting classes), but there are certainly news outlets, and even highly stylized, longer-form writers, who give good context. The argument that newspapers don’t provide enough context, I think, is really yet another byproduct of the laziness of our population.