Survey emphasizes need for vigilance on press standards
Jody Powell, the former Jimmy Carter press secretary who died this week, said in an interview once that he often referred to a note card he kept that contained this phrase: "It takes a strong democracy to survive a free press."
He used the phrase as a way of demonstrating his respect for news media that are independent and critical of government, but its tone reflects the bureaucrat's at-best grudging acknowledgment of the necessity to be challenged. Interestingly, it appears most Americans - now three decades removed from the Carter Administration - harbor similar ambivalence.
According to a biennial survey released this week by the Pew Center for Public Research, the American public today distrusts its news media as much as at any time since the poll was first taken in 1985, yet people also admit that the nation at large and their local communities specifically, would be worse off without them.
There is much in the survey to worry news organizations that, like the Daily Herald, strive to be recognized as reliable and objective. Respondents overwhelmingly told the pollsters they believe that news coverage is biased, that it is unduly influenced by powerful interests, that it is often inaccurate and tries to hide its mistakes.
These complaints in and of themselves are hardly new, but their depth is virtually unprecedented. Media accuracy has been a particular weakness in the survey since at least the 1990s, and the nearly two-thirds who say the news media is biased represents a dramatic swing from the more than half in 1985 who said the media were careful to avoid bias.
Perhaps the most curious result, to me, was the way people viewed broadcast and print news media. It was hardly surprising that only 11 percent thought Internet sites do much to cover local news, but it did seem odd to me that so many respondents consider television the major producer of local news.
Whatever one may think about television news itself, I can't imagine that someone reading aloud just the local news portions of a given day's Chicago Tribune, Sun-Times, or especially Daily Herald could complete the task in a half-hour television broadcast, and I'm willing to bet that 80 percent of the Daily Herald's content is considered too local ever to merit a mention on a TV broadcast.
Yet, just under half the people surveyed said local television stations do the most to uncover and report on important local issues, with just a quarter saying local newspapers are the primary sources of local news reporting.
Go figure.
But you can't argue with the facts. Perceptions are as much reality as reality itself when human beings are involved. So, it's important that we newspapers pay attention to surveys like this one. Its results are interesting on many levels, and you can read them for yourself at pewresearch.org/pubs/1341/press-accuracy-rating-hits-two-decade-low.
The key message I'd like to give you related to all this is that the Daily Herald takes its reputation as an objective, accurate source of local news extremely seriously. We realize that many people still evaluate us critically - and, frankly, to an extent that's good. An enlightened public doesn't take news at face value from any single source. We welcome scrutiny and we're confident that it just makes us work harder to meet the high standards an effective local newspaper should achieve.
Powell may be right about the relationship of a free press to a strong democracy, but there's a corollary to his point that also bears repeating: The demonstrable fact is that no democracy, weak or strong, can survive without a free press.
However we may occasionally fall short of our ideals, we aim to make sure that, when it comes to the Daily Herald, you're never ambivalent on that point.