Will newspapers keep their soul?

There's something else about their reading habits worth considering. As Joseph Epstein, a commentator of generally conservative predilections, points out in a forthcoming essay on the future of newspapers: "Not only are we acquiring our information from new places but we are taking it pretty much on our own terms. The magazine Wired recently defined the word 'egocasting' as 'the consumption of on-demand music, movies, television and other media that cater to individual and not mass-market tastes.' The news, too, is now getting to be on-demand."

Pew has been polling on public attitudes toward the news media since 1985, when it was the Times Mirror Center, so its surveys are among the most useful for charting trends in this area. Although Pew's most recent study finds the percentage of Americans who think the press is inaccurate or biased has grown over the last 20 years, the younger, better-educated, Internet-reliant readers have a view more skeptical than most. That's one of Pew's interesting findings; the other is this:

"Opinions about the news media have grown much more partisan, particularly over the past decade. Far more than twice as many Republicans as Democrats say news organizations are too critical of America (63% vs. 23%). There is virtually no measure of press performance on which there is not a substantial gap in the views of political partisans. . .

"While Republicans generally are much more critical of the press than are Democrats, Republicans who rely on Fox News as their main news source have an even less favorable opinion of the press than do other Republicans. Fully 71% of Republicans who list Fox as their main news source hold an unfavorable opinion of major national newspapers, compared with 52% of Republicans who use other sources and 33% of those who are not Republicans."

That may not be too surprising, but this finding is: "As many as 38% of those who rely mostly on the Internet for news [those younger, better-educated readers] say they have an unfavorable opinion of cable news networks, such as CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, compared with 25% of the public overall and just 17% of television news viewers."