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Jewish World Review May 30, 2005 / 21 Iyar , 5765 Real vs. media world By Bill Steigerwald
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The journalism biz is getting hammered again and rightly so.
Newsweek has cinched the Dan Rather Memorial Media Scandal of the Month Award for mistakenly reporting that U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo had desecrated a Quran by throwing it in a toilet.
Meanwhile, the uproar over Newsweek's deadly slip-up eclipsed a broader indictment of the journalism profession that came out last week — the results of a University of Connecticut phone poll of 1,000 adults and 300 TV and newspaper journalists.
The survey grabbed most of its media attention by discovering that only 14 percent of the constitutionally challenged public could name "freedom of the press" as one of the guarantees found in the First Amendment. On the same question, journalists scored 57 percent, which gets scarier the more you think about it.
In addition to such disturbing findings that 22 percent think the government should be allowed to censor newspapers, the survey found that 61 percent of our fellow citizens think news coverage is biased.
No new news there. The poll takers didn't specify whether it is a liberal bias or a conservative one, but here's a clue: 68 percent of the journalists surveyed voted for John Kerry in 2004 and 25 percent for George W. Bush.
The poll's most damning finding is how poorly the public thinks the press is doing when it comes to performing its basic job — providing a free citizenry with accurate and trustworthy news and information.
According to the study, while 72 percent of journalists smugly believe the press does an "excellent" or "good" job of reporting information accurately, only 39 percent of the public does.
That sounds like the public is being too tough on the beleaguered journalism sector. But maybe the news-consuming public has gotten smarter than most people think.
Maybe when Joe and Mary Sixpack compare the real world they live in with the consistently troubled, violent, sensationalized world the news media present to them day after day, they notice the obvious discrepancies.
Yet today there are fewer incidents of murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, property crime, burglary and car thefts in the United States per year than there were in the early 1990s. Homicides peaked at 24,703 in 1991. In 2003, though America had added 40 million more people, they had fallen to 16,503.
Another good example is the minimum wage "crisis." You hear so much about it from the pro-union media, you'd think half the 73.9 million hourly-paid workers in the country make $5.15 or less. Yet U.S. Department of Labor stats say only 2.7 percent do.
Thanks to the media, Americans also believe all kinds of important things that just aren't true — we're running out of oil, global warming is a proven serious threat, most black people are still poor and oppressed — and often demand government action to fix them.
But by focusing on the negative, by inventing crises that don't exist, by filtering the real world through their liberal social and economic ideology, the mainstream news media present us with a world that is far more dangerous, less prosperous and more unhealthy than it really is.
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JWR contributor Bill Steigerwald is an associate editor and columnist at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. Comment by clicking here. © 2005, Bill Steigerwald |
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