Posted on 05/23/2004 4:50:37 PM PDT by 11th Earl of Mar
Today: May 23, 2004 at 13:01:37 PDT
Journalists Worried About News Quality, Not Plagarism By WILL LESTER ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) - Journalists are growing more concerned that bottom-line financial pressures are "seriously hurting" the quality of news coverage, according to a survey taken at a time when news organizations face increased competition for readers and viewers.
A majority of national and local journalists say they think financial pressures are hurting coverage, said the survey released Sunday by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.
"Journalists are in a glummer mood than we've found them in the past," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. "That view is much more prevalent where cutbacks have happened."
The number of national journalists who think bottom-line financial pressures are hurting coverage was 66 percent this year, compared with about 40 percent in a Pew survey from 1995.
Just under six in 10 local journalists were more worried about financial pressures hurting quality, compared with one-third in 1995.
More than half of the executives at national news organizations said increased business pressures are "just changing the way news organizations do things."
Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said a news media study earlier this year found many news organizations have cut staff.
"We found that most sectors of the news media, other than online and ethnic media, are losing audience because there is so much more competition," Rosenstiel said.
About half of those whom Pew surveyed from newspapers and magazines said they have seen reductions in the size of their newsroom staff in the past three years.
Despite these concerns about cut, about seven in 10 news professionals say the management in their news operation is excellent or good.
National journalists were more likely than a decade ago to say there are too many factual errors in coverage, while local reporters were less inclined to say that was a problem.
A majority of journalists of all backgrounds and different type of operations said they do not think plagiarism is more widespread now, despite widely publicized cases in the past year.
The survey found a reduction in the number of journalists who think news reporters are too cynical and many now think they are too timid.
More than half of national journalists say the press has not been critical enough of President Bush. Local journalists were about evenly split between thinking the press is not critical enough or is fair in its treatment of the president.
Nearly eight in 10 in both the national and local news media say that not enough attention is paid to complex issues, similar to Pew's findings on this question in 1995 and 1999.
A majority of news professionals say the emergence of the Internet has made journalism better, especially because it has improved research methods.
The survey was taken from March 10 through April 20 of 547 national and local journalists, both print and broadcast. The sample was chosen from national directories of staffers, editors and executives at newspapers, magazines, wire services, national networks and local television stations from the 100 largest markets.
Journalism self-defines as wisdom...no journalist would deny the claim that "journalism" is objective, and objectivity is impossible without wisdom....
Nevah, nevah heard journalism defined as "wisdom." You are making a jokie?? The second oldest profession, journalism, is the practice of wisdom"??? That IS hilarious!!...But just go watch the wonderful version of "The Front Page" with Gary Grant and Rosalind Russell - a not inaccurate depiction of how the great world of newspapering used to be - when it was FUN. (It's all very, very g-r-i-m now!)
J. is wisdom! - even the worst of the media whores (m & f) would/will laugh at that...(To be sure, J. attracts the best and the worst of people)...There used to be some interesting types working in this racket: erratic, eccentric - but good people. Some even knew Shakespeare by line...some gloried in the (then) rare but meaningful by-line...none had pretensions to "wisdom." "Wisdom" came with our new "journalists".
The first step to wisdom is submitting one's self to the Creator. The new "journalists" so often each think they ARE the Lord. When man does away with religion , he has to find a substitute - materialism, a "great cause" or/and a "great person" (both to identify with), his or her self. These persons are above truth...they were put here to tell the rest of us how to live...theirs is a "wisdom" of narcissism and arrogance.
Excuse me, that should be CARY Grant. The slippage of J standards is contagious.
A related article here
"Pew Survey Finds Moderates, Liberals Dominate News Outlets "
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000517184
Oh yeah, that's just what I was thinking! They haven't called for his hanging yet, and until they do, they aren't tough enough! /sarcasm
As I type this, AP, Reuters, and CBS are spinning stories in Iraq that are directly on par with the propaganda that Tokyo Rose and Lord Haw-Haw perpetrated in WW II. The only difference is that the allies had enough sense to bring these criminals to justice.
If these reporters don't see their callous bias and treachery, they either have mental problems, are clinically insane, or they are immoral and evil.
I believe it is the latter.
| Professor's Study Shows Liberal Bias in News Media | ||||||
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Great Debate#9 Break up Microsoft?...Then how about the media "Big Six"? [ ... -Poll confirms Ivy League liberal tilt--
A poll by the Center for the Study of Social and Political Change in 1992, eighty-three percent of film and television writers, directors and producers voted for Bill Clinton. Eighty-three percent. The vote that Clinton received in the country at large, forty-three percent.
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The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.My point in alluding to wisdom and journalism in the same breath was precisely to point to the dissonance between claims of journalistic objectivity on the one hand, and journalism's evanescent nature on the other.
When you own the printing press, you create a virtual world in which you are important. That goes to people's heads in a big way, and they start to think they are as important as they make themselves seem in that virtual world - and worse, they sucker a lot of us into going along with the gag. Journalism is an important function, but it is not politically neutral between conservatism and "changeism."
To be clear, "conservatism" is locale-specific. American conservatism defines the end of government in the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Constitution, and the means of government in the body of the Constitution and in the laws of Congress and the States. But since freedom "the blessings of liberty" is an end of government, American conservatism is designed for change by the people, allowing us to progress by making small mistakes and thereby learning to work smarter.
In the USSR, OTOH, conservatism functionally defined the end of government as the close control of change and thus the prevention of liberty. It was a system to avoid the small mistake, but it thereby set itself up to make whoppers.
In either setting free journalism is corrosive. "Glasnost" (openness) was utterly incompatible with the Soviet system and had to bring that system to grief. But, notwithstanding the fact that free journalism is built into the US Constitution, free journalism is corrosive of conservatism here as well. It functions as an acid test, taking away what is not gold but also dissolving at least a slight amount of gold as well. The great problem American conservatism faces is the fact that journalism needs scalps, and if conservatism does not oblige journalism with some actual abuses to criticize, journalism will make them.
Thus we see "all Abu Grahib, all the time" coverage of something which should have been prevented but which the government identified and undertook to correct on its own initiative. Journalism treats it as seriously as journalism treated Filegate. Journalism treats it as seriously as journalism treated two thousand crimes committed in the White House under color of the president's authority - even while it treats it unseriously, by giving the woman smack in the middle of the chain of command a gender pass.
Why Broadcast Journalism is
Unnecessary and Illegitimate
Who pays the salaries of those who sell the sizzle instead of the steak?
Media Bias Bump.
A kid goes into college wanting to be Edward R. Murrow and comes out aspiring to be Jason Blair. That's the problem.
Professors of journalism themselves have been corrupted by the leftist ideology. They forgot where they came from and what words like integrity and impartiality meant.
They take a student, all bright eyed and full of enthusiasm and in four short years, turn him into another spewer of propaganda and leftist trash.
They force these kids to sell their souls so that they can write for the paper. It is blackmail really.
My wife came from the media. When I met her, Reagan was finishing up his second term. She hated Reagan. Asked why, she would look at me like I was crazy. She would say, "look what Reagan did to this country." And I would so, "I know, that's why we are in such good shape. Look what Carter did." She didn't get it. Almost 15 years later, she has her own media business and every now and then she would turn to me and say, "Clinton was President? What was I thinking?"
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