Earlier this week, I wrote for GBH News about a study showing little support for the core principles of journalism. Joshua Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab has done an exceptionally deep dive into the numbers and has concluded that they don’t say what the study’s authors claim.
Benton’s explanation is that the Media Insight Project took unambiguous support for certain journalistic verities and watered it down by pairing it with findings that showed a more dubious view of the press. Benton writes:
Its top-line finding summarized by a [Washington] Post headline writer as “
Bad news for journalists: The public doesn’t share our values” is bogus. Or, at a minimum, unsupported by the methodology in use here. There is no reason to believe, based on this data, that Americans have somehow abandoned the basic values of democratic governance, or that we noble journalists are left to fight the lonely fight for accountability.
A study that seemed to claim they had was treated as "bad news for journalists: the public doesn’t share our values." The reality is a few arbitrary research design decisions put a thumb on the scale.
Why buy a yacht when you can buy a newspaper?
21 Apr, 2021 07:56 PM
9 minutes to read
One arena in which the billionaires can still win plaudits as civic-minded saviors is buying the metropolitan daily newspaper. Photo / 123RF
One arena in which the billionaires can still win plaudits as civic-minded saviors is buying the metropolitan daily newspaper. Photo / 123RF
New York Times
By: Nicholas Kulish
Billionaires aren t usually cast as saviours of democracy. But one way they are winning plaudits for civic-minded endeavours is by funding the Fourth Estate. Billionaires have had a pretty good pandemic. There are more of them than there were a year ago, even as the crisis has exacerbated inequality. But scrutiny has followed these ballooning fortunes. Policymakers are debating new taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals. Even their philanthropy has come under increasing criticism as an exercise of power as much as generosity.
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An inclusive public sphere
An inclusive public sphere
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April 19, 2021 00:19 IST
The acrimonious social media space is not encouraging dialogue but is instead generating new forms of silos
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The acrimonious social media space is not encouraging dialogue but is instead generating new forms of silos
Unlike India, the United States has an empirical approach to measure the decline in trust in the media. A recent study by the Media Insight Project, a collaboration of the American Press Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, shows two phases of decline. The slide started in the pre-Internet decades between 1972 and 2000. It seems rather ironic as this period was dominated by some of the finest investigative reports such as the Watergate investigations by