Expectations and Satisfaction with the News

Do people expect more from print versus television news?

Let's be clear, the majority of those surveyed say they turn to TV for news more than any other medium (though we're seeing a shift from TV to the Net).  So if people prefer TV news, shouldn't they expect more from it?  Or do they expect more from print because, well, their expectations of quality are different than their preferences?

I raise these questions not because I can point to a study that will answer them, but only to show the kinds of silly ideas that get stuck in my head in the middle of the night.

My gut feeling, without scouring Pew and other sources of such data, is that a news medium differs in the mind of most people on a number of dimensions. There is preference (TV is easy, entertaining, colorful, engaging, and of course suffers from delusions of adequacy).  But I suspect there are dimensions beyond preference.  We may prefer Dancing with the Stars, but we know other shows are better for us.  Indeed, respondents may say TV is better, but I wonder whether they also have higher expectations for print news -- in terms of fairness, or comprehensiveness, or simple good judgment and ethical behavior.

Here's an experiment.  Take a TV news story, create an identical (as close as you can) print version, randomly assign folks to watch one or read the other.  Make sure the story is something of an ethical lapse, mild at best, on the part of the newscast.  Maybe it's sensationalistic.  Give the stories to study subjects and see what they think.  I'm guessing, without any good theoretical rationale, that the disappointment will be greater for the print product than for the TV product.  This may be the print guy in me talking. 

Here's where it all falls apart.  If a person has a "relationship" with a TV personality they are more likely to forgive or argue away any lapses on the part of that person (think Olbermann, think Beck).  You have to control for that or just set it aside.  The real question is this: are there unconscious higher expectations for a print version of a story compared to a TV version of a story?  I'm willing to bet there are, but hell if I know exactly how to test it since creating a comparative version in both media is really difficult.  

Kicking Journalism's Ass

I love Ira Glass and This American Life.  In a talk this week, he offered: "Opinion in all its forms is kicking the ass of journalism."

Ouch.

He especially blasted TV news, and he especially praised Jon Stewart (and, in an offhanded way, Glenn Beck, who he called "fascinating" without further elaboration).  A story about the talk is here.

He's on to something, of course.  Opinion is kicking journalism's ass, at least when it comes to ratings and attention.  That is, if you don't consider "opinion" as "journalism," which gets a bit confusing.  Is an editorial opinion?  Yes.  Is it journalism?  Kinda yes.  But what he's really doing is comparing the delivery of standard television news with the delivery of the host of TV talkmeisters, from Maddow to O'Reilly to Colbert to, well, all the people doing pretty damn well in the ratings.

Oh, and he praises NPR too.

News, Opinion, and the old Editorial Page

Since the age of dinosaurs, newspapers have had "opinion" or "editorial" pages. Readers would find "institutional editorials" to represent the opinion of the paper, "columns" to represent opinions of individuals (often journalists), "letters-to-the-editor" to represent readers, and an "editorial cartoon" to represent art-as-opinion.

News dominated the "A-section" and theoretically was devoid of opinion by journalists, but near the end of the front section you'd often find the editorial page -- and opinion.

TV news rarely included editorial opinion. A few local stations had some kook who'd come on at the end and share, but rarely did the networks do so (60 Minutes being an exception, but that was a news magazine, not a newscast).

We've reversed this approach.

Now, opinion seems to be the "A-section" of most cable news programming, with a little news tucked in here and there. Certainly that's the Fox News and MSNBC approach, and to a lesser degree (and less successfully) one pursued by CNN. Newspapers still have a front section and opinion pages, but the average reader looks at it and wonders "what's the difference?" True or not, it's a damn good question.

Bloggers often start with the assumption that there's no difference between news and opinion, that "truth" is the ultimate goal. As if journalists don't also try to get at "the best obtainable version of the truth." One of the differences is "obtainable." Journalists gather information, bloggers often react to information (yes, there are great exceptions to this, but I'm in no mood to get subtle, but yeah there are some damn good bloggers out there actually walking and talking and leaving the safety of their mom's basement to find stuff out).

The line between news and entertainment have blurred, not only in practice, but also in the minds of many Americans. The line between news and opinion? Same line. Blurred.

Is this a bad thing?

To old traditionally trained journalism guys like me, the answer should be YES! But I'm not so sure. I'm still wrestling with this, balancing the practical against the philosophical.

I now divide the world not into mainstream media and non-mainstream media, but into two other camps: Rational Media and Irrational Media. I'll get more into this dichotomy on another post, but rational is not merely in the eyes of the beholder. And I'm not entirely convinced my reasoning here won't unravel if one smart person tugs at a thread, but then again that's what this blog is for, to test ideas. But I'll give you a hint. Irrational Media include not only Fox News (easy) but also Jon Stewart. It includes Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity (easy), but it also includes others that will make conservatives and liberals angry. I'm a radical moderate, so it's not like I care.

The Need to Know, and the Need to Feel

There's been a shift in the news media audience in the past 10 years or so. Yes, it's fragmented. Yes, it's shrunk. But interesting to me is how people seem to be shifting from a need to know to a need to feel.

News media serve a surveillance function for many people. Journalists feed the need to know, the need to keep up with what's happening, a sense of connectedness and knowledge that many people find vital, if not absolutely necessary, to get through their day either because of jobs or because they're news junkies.

But of late, with the growth of TV and radio talk shows but most especially thanks to cable TV news, there has been a replacing of the need to know with the need to feel.

Talkmeisters of all partisan stripes, from Lou Dobbs to Sean Hannity sell one thing today and it's not knowledge. It's anger and frustration and righteous indignation. Sure, they pepper their gabbing with bits of information, but even a fan has to acknowledge the info is skewed, that straw men are set up and knocked down. Hannity and Bill O'Reilly can't do a show without name calling, for example, and they often falsely or incompletely portray the other side. No wonder they hate the idea of a fairness doctrine (btw, so do I).

They want people to feel more than they want people to know.

If they wanted people to know they'd offer fairer portrayals of the other side. If they wanted people to know they'd cover topics other than those laced with partisan and ideological intrigue -- some of it nonexistent except in their own minds (saving Christmas? Jeez, ever walk into a real store?). If they wanted people to know they wouldn't openly mislead, which happens all the time on these programs (don't even get me started on how they screw up science to fit their partisan beliefs).

But people don't want to know so much as they want to know what to feel.

All news, especially cable TV news, continues to edge this way. The news audience as a whole has shrunk and as a result has become more partisan and ideological. The battle is on for this smaller yet passionate group and the results ain't pretty. CNN dodges left and right trying to find an audience. Fox News has been doing this bit for years, spending more time talking about the news than actually covering it. MSNBC is doing well with a small, loyal liberal audience. Foundering newspapers may be next to get on the bandwagon, but I don't know if it'll save 'em.

In some ways this is not so bad. I think we'll see the growth of advocacy journalism not unlike, in superficial ways at least, the old partisan press prior to the 1830s. This will free journalists and cause innumerable problems as well, but that's for another post. Indeed I've proposed an undergraduate class in advocacy journalism to explore what I think our new journalism will look like -- even offered to swap out a graduate class to teach it -- but I've heard nada from my boss. Ah well.

Selectively Covering the End of Journalism

The big TV news networks love talking about the economic struggles facing newspapers. You get to drag out all that old video of printing presses and cool old movies like The Front Page.

But when it comes to TV news facing similar problems, not so much coverage. But let me warn you, I have some methodological issues to deal with after the next graph.

A NYTimes article about a study by the fine folks at Annenberg finds lots and lots of newspaper coverage about the struggles of newspapers, and lots and lots of TV coverage about the struggles of newspapers, but when it comes to covering TV news and its problems the results kinda fall apart. Kinda. The sampled newspapers apparently (I haven't seen the actual report) had 900 stories about the struggles of papers and 95 stories about the struggles of TV news. TV news had 38 stories about the struggles of newspapers and a measly six about their own problems.

Now it's methodology time. If my math is right, that means 90 percent of newspaper articles on problems of the two media were about papers. That also means 86 percent of TV news stories about the two media are about newspapers. Without cranking up my SPSS and doing a little chi-square analysis, I'm fairly sure there's no statistically significant difference here. Also the press release has, it seems, slightly different numbers than in the NYTimes article (I can't locate the original PR release, but this blog has some text attributed to the PR people).

So, much ado about nothing?

Yes.

First off, if the numbers are right, the proportions are about the same or at least close enough to warrant concern. Second, newspaper struggles are simply a better story, one full of history and democracy and a helluva hook with the shutdowns at major metro papers in Seattle, etc. And yeah, the TV hairdos don't want to spend time talking about the decline of viewers, and that says something about them and their willingness (or lack thereof) to examine their own shops.

In terms of what people know, this is obvious: people know newspapers are failing, given the extensive coverage by all media, but there's a good chance they don't know that TV news suffers from many of the same problems. It's time TV news took a hard, honest look at itself rather than running all that video of printing presses.

Summing Up

After years of marinating in the topic, this week I sum up what we know about the relationships between media use and political knowledge. Sometimes I'll even talk about one without the other, but mostly how the two fit.

Topic Today: TV News.

Let's get the obvious out of the way first. TV news kinda sucks. You see it all the time -- propping up two partisan hacks against one another and think this somehow magically informs viewers. And local tv news is laughable. That's all easy and out of the way so now we can move on to how watching TV news is related to what people know.

For years the answer was simple: TV news does little or nothing how people learn about politics and public affairs.

Hell, we'd even find negative relationships. In other words, the more you watch TV, the less you knew. For those of us who study cognition, we called it cog-sucking. TV sucks out your brains.

And now we know better.

For the least educated, the least interested, TV news actually aids in learning. TV news makes public affairs accessible. It tells stories in ways people understand, often with narrative hooks or focus on a single person to get us into the story. For those who don't know much, or don't care much, TV news can make a big difference in what they know about the world.

What else do we know so far? TV news is fragmenting. Spin around the dial to the cable guys and watch for a while. MSNBC to the kooky left, Fox to the kooky right, and CNN just kooky. Forget about local tv news. Delusions of adequacy is going too far and no serious person takes local tv news, well, seriously (there are exceptions, but not gonna get into them here).

How people learn from TV is an interesting question, given the flashing video and lights and pretty people and smarmy chatter and talking heads and music and all the rest. People glean bits and pieces from the news through, often, inadvertent exposure. The highly informed, they can get a lot out of breaking news, the less informed get a bit here and there. Given the ceiling effect for the highly informed they can't improve much, but for the least interested, it makes a big difference. For that reason alone, TV news plays a vital role in a democracy. Think of TV as necessary but far from sufficient for a democracy to succeed.

Tomorrow, either more on TV or perhaps a different medium.

Media Bias and Presidential Campaigns

We all know the old mantra: the media is biased. First off, that's grammatically incorrect. The media are biased. Plural.

And yes, they are, but not in the way most people think.

But I'm not going there today. Instead I just read a research paper on whether the 2004 presidential election coverage was biased. The answer? Surprising. The authors, all four of them, looked at bias within stories and within segments. So you may have a single story that is biased (partisan), but if it's balanced by another piece just after, it comes out kinda even (structural). A good idea, one reflective of the way TV does "journalism" (and I'm being kind here).

The findings from the July-September 2008 Mass Communication & Society piece (Volume 11, #3):

• There is often a bias toward a challenger. That's the nature of politics, of journalism, and they found this in 2004 as well. We've seen a challenger bias in other studies. Change = news.
• The broadcast networks had more even partisan and structural balance than the cable news networks. The explanation? Broadcast networks like ABC, et al., have a less-interested news audience so they have to broaden their partisan perspective. Not sure Bill O'Reilly would buy this, but it makes sense.
• CBS and Fox showed the greatest "partisan tilt" in the study -- both for Kerry. Wow! Fox for Kerry? Odd, weird, counter intuitive. And cool. I honestly can't explain this one but the methodology seems sound.
• Broadcast networks spent less time on Swiftboat and National Guard stories than did the cable networks. You could argue this was partisan in nature, but I suspect it has more to do with bullet #1 above. Different audience, less consisting of news/partisan junkies.