A large number of Americans think the news media are biased and sensationalistic--less capable of fair, accurate reporting and less worthy of their trust and confidence than in earlier years, according to a new Los Angeles Times poll.
Although overall ratings for the media remain substantially favorable in the poll, these favorable ratings are generally much lower--and unfavorable ratings generally higher--than in previous surveys.
The poll findings offer discouraging signs to news executives already beset by diminished readership and advertising, by criticisms of bias, irrelevance and sensationalism in the last election and by renewed attacks on media credibility in the aftermath of the disclosure that NBC News had rigged the test of a General Motors pickup truck in a staged crash. Indeed, more than half the poll respondents said they thought that incidents like NBC's rigged crash were either "very common" or "somewhat common" in the news media.
Despite this, favorable ratings for network television news generally declined somewhat less precipitously in The Times Poll than they did for newspapers and for local TV news, and 88% of the poll respondents said they thought that, overall, the news media--television, newspapers, magazines and radio--continue to do a "very good" or "fairly good" job.
Most of these (71%) said the media do a "fairly good" job--not exactly a ringing endorsement; only 17% said the news media do a "very good" job--a big drop from the 30% who gave the media a "very good" rating in a 1985 Times Poll.
Only 11% said the news media do a "very bad" or "fairly bad" job--up from the 4%, "bad" rating the media received in 1985. Thus, the overall ratio of people who think the news media do a "good job" to those who think they do a "bad job" has dropped from almost 23-to-1 to 8-to-1.
This trend continued throughout the poll, with the most favorable rating ("very good") declining considerably in almost every category of media performance, while the overall favorable rating ("very good" plus "fairly good") declined slightly and the unfavorable rating ("very bad" plus "fairly bad"), though relatively small in most categories, increasing noticeably in most categories.
The overall findings of the poll--especially when compared with earlier surveys--amount to something of a wake-up call for the news media, clear notification that although most Americans still respect them, that respect is diminishing and could erode further if the practices they find most objectionable are not corrected.
