Press Going Too Easy on Bush
Journalists are unhappy with the way things are going in their profession these days. Many give poor grades to the coverage offered by the types of media that serve most Americans: daily newspapers, local TV, network TV news and cable news outlets. In fact, despite recent scandals at the New York Times and USA Today, only national newspapers - and the websites of national news organizations - receive good performance grades from the journalistic ranks.
Roughly half of journalists at national media outlets (51%), and about as many from local media (46%), believe that journalism is going in the wrong direction, as significant majorities of journalists have come to believe that increased bottom-line pressure is "seriously hurting" the quality of news coverage. This is the view of 66% of national news people and 57% of the local journalists questioned in this survey.
Journalists at national news organizations generally take a dimmer view of state of the profession than do local journalists. But both groups express considerably more concern over the deleterious impact of bottom-line pressures than they did in polls taken by the Pew Research Center in 1995 and 1999. Further, both print and broadcast journalists voice high levels of concern about this problem, as do majorities working at nearly all levels of news organizations.
The survey of journalists was conducted March 10-April 20 among 547 national and local reporters, editors and executives by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, in collaboration with the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Committee of Concerned Journalists.
The poll finds that many journalists - especially those in the national media - believe that the press has not been critical enough of President Bush. Majorities of print and broadcast journalists at national news organizations believe the press has been insufficiently critical of the administration. More broadly, there has been a steep decline in the percentage of news people who think the traditional criticism of the press as too cynical still holds up. If anything, more national news people today fault the press for being too timid, not too cynical.
View Report: <http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=214>