The big media story of the day is the Newsweek/Koran debacle. And, of course, every blogger has his/her/their take on the issue. We’ll be addressing that elsewhere, but for now we turn to another media story.
That story is a new poll released by the University of Connecticut which, as Editor & Publisher put it, “reveals a wide gap on many media issues between a group of journalists and the general public.”
The most glaring statistic: 43 percent of the public said they believe the press has too much freedom. Only 3 percent of journalists agreed. (By the way: CJR Daily thinks that the 3 percent itself represents some sort of sampling error. If not, and you’re one of those journalists who believes you have too much freedom, please contact us. We’d like to hear from you.)
Even more scary (to us, anyway) is that, while 95 percent of journalists “strongly agreed” that newspapers should be allowed ”to publish freely without governmental approval of a story,” only 55 percent of the public “strongly agreed.” (Our first thought: good thing those folks weren’t in charge during the Washington Post‘s Watergate coverage. We could be living through Richard M. Nixon’s tenth term in office.)
Rob at the Say Anything blog pins the tail on the journalists: “But really, its nobody else’s fault but the journalists themselves. They brought their political agenda to the table, now they’re paying the price for it.” Seeking a solution, Rob suggests, in part, “I can’t help but feel that if a lot of them had just been honest about where they’re coming from politically a lot of this could have been avoided.”
Dave Wissing at the Hedgehog Report clips another result from the poll — that Democrats outnumbered Republicans by a margin of 3-1 among the 300 journalists surveyed — and jokes, “The Press is Liberal … shocking, I know.” Like Rob, Wissing is full of suggestions: “Since many in the media probably favor ‘affirmative action,’ why is it they don’t believe in affirmative action concerning political ideology? It might actually help bring the balance to the ‘mainstream’ media that they claim to aspire to …”
Gerry at Daly Thoughts links to Wissing, and elaborates on the gap between the daily scribes and their readers. The poll reported that only 10 percent of the journalists were self-identified conservatives, 28 percent liberal, and 53 percent considered themselves “moderate.” Daly cites a Harris Interactive poll that shows that “by comparison … the [ideological] breakdown of Americans find that between 34-38 percent of Americans consider themselves conservative, and between 18-20 percent consider themselves liberal.” Daly certainly has a point, but even the Harris poll found that “the largest number of people think of themselves as moderates.”
And finally, Fishbowl NYC offers an extensive roundup of the newly redesigned New York Times business section. There’s not much in the way of genuine criticism, other than this little shot: “We went out and actually spent one of our hard-earned dollars just to get a gander at the brand-spanking new NYT Business Day section (good thing, too, because nothing looks different online, and there’s nary a link to the “New Look and Lineup” box on page 1. So that’s the benefit of actually reading newspapers!).”
Clever, those guys at the Times — they figured out a way to get Fishbowl to part with a dollar.
–Thomas Lang
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.