Much of the attention on the Pew report released this week focused on the public’s opinion of the news media, which continued a decline that Pew had measured for a few years now. The researchers themselves highlighted the decline in their overview of the report.
I was intrigued by another portion of the survey, one which asked from which medium the respondents were most likely to get their local and national/international news. On national and international news, the race wasn’t close: Just from eyeballing the numbers, around 75% of respondents said they got their news from television, compared to around 40% from the Internet, and lower from newspapers, radio, etc. On local news, the distribution was less drastic, but TV still led at 64%, followed by newspapers at 41%.
Why would the numbers skew toward television?
One reasonable response is that people can’t get non-local news from newspapers, even if they wanted to, because the space for such copy has decreased in recent years. [1] But if people wanted to get local and national news from a newspaper, how does one explain the survey’s finding that most Americans aren’t familiar enough with The New York Times to express an opinion about it? If people wanted high-quality news but didn’t have access to the Times, they would at least have a high rating of it.
A less-generous response, however, is that most news consumers aren’t interested in national or international news, and for that matter, probably not much in local news either. Why would people prefer news from television when its quality is so horrid unless TV’s deficiencies didn’t bother them?
I think it’s easily demonstrable that TV news is a terrible way to inform yourself about the world. From a theoretical standpoint, I love Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. But skip the book if you want and just ask yourself: When was the last time your local TV news busted out a great explainer (like This American Life’s oft-praised “The Giant Pool of Money”) on anything? How about a nuanced, humble presentation of an argument?
Or, go even more basic. Think about those people, like David Simon, who ask, “who will cover the zoning board?” I have never, ever, seen a television report about a zoning board meeting. Please, prove me wrong. Offer me a counter-example, just one. I’m young and have only seen so much.
Be it your local news, CNN, NBC Nightly News, no recent examples come to mind. Not that explainers are easy to create, certainly. Few news sources anywhere come up with good ones. But TV news appears to be particularly devoid of them, and yet that’s where most minds are headed.
Further complicating the picture is the lack of definition of “news” as the respondents see it. The ambiguity means “news” could be Noordin Top as easily as Kanye West.
Lighten up!
OK, OK. I admit, I’m not breaking new ground by claiming that interest in news is not too widespread. But I do wonder whether, when we construct the “reader” or “consumer” or “participant” or however we define a person today in relation to information, we take into account what the Pew report reminds us of. I also wonder how people who ask about the future of “the Baghdad bureau” (or the zoning board bureau) feel about the fact that no few from the general public is rushing with lifeboats to save newspapers because, well, no one was really reading them.
Are there other implications of the Pew statistic? Am I being too harsh on humanity? I’d love to hear your thoughts or critiques in the comments.
Notes
1. This is especially true for American broadcasters. See “Foreign News: What’s Next?”, by Michael Parks in the Columbia Journalism Review, and “The Shrinking of Foreign News,” by Garrick Utley, from Foreign Affairs. For a discussion on space for international stories in print, see “The shrinking foreign newshole of the New York Times,” by Daniel Riffe et al, from the Newspaper Research Journal. (Return to post)
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