Sins of his fathers

"Evening News" Turns An Eye On The Press

CBS News' in-house blogger Vaughn Ververs: Friday was “media day” for the CBS “Evening News,” as the broadcast focused on “the state of the media” in the last part of a week-long series and unveiled a new weekly feature, “Assignment America” (more about that later). And CBS released the results of a poll on the media with some rather surprising results, not all of which made Friday’s show.

In introducing correspondent Anthony Mason’s package on the media, anchor Bob Schieffer mentioned some of the findings of the poll, namely that 63% of respondents had “at least some confidence” in the stories reported by the press while 69% generally believe stories to be accurate. That’s a pretty high number, but maybe I’m just jaded from reading all the criticism the media has gotten lately. Here are some other findings of that poll:
-The numbers of respondents who said they felt stories reported by the media are accurate match exactly results from a 1994 CBS News poll. In both cases, 69% said they believed the media was generally accurate while 22% said inaccurate.

-When asked, in general, how often the media tells the truth, 59% said all or most of the time while 40% said some of the time or hardly ever. When the same question was asked about members the Bush Administration, 39% said they tell the truth all or most of the time while 58% said they told the truth some of the time or hardly ever.

I'm not sure what to make of Vaughn Ververs' post. He finds it surprisingly good news that a majority of the public has some confidence in the news, and finds it more or less accurate? He's okay that 40% of Americans think the media hardly ever--or never--tells the truth?

There's a huge disconnect between the reality of journalism, and what the public seems to think of it. Part of it is sloppiness on the part of reporters--some silly errors in VV's post doesn't exactly inspire confidence in his employer.

But a lot of it is the public doesn't wanna hear the truth sometimes, and when it does, it's easier to chalk it up to media bias or lies than to take a hard look at the issue or yourself and--horrors!--change your mind.

And for a CBS employee to talk about the public's skewed perception of journalism and not even mention the shameful way his employer used a manufactured crisis about Dan Rather's ethics to run him out of town is either gross incompetence or ignorance, or spinelessness.

Classic CBS logo found in various places online.