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."
