Whiskey & Water: Truth
Posted on 03 November 2009 | by Wendy Norris | 
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To borrow a phrase from ’70s punk music icon Elvis Costello: My aim is true.
With all the gawky thrashing about the news industry’s broken business model precious little attention has been devoted to the more immediate editorial crisis — a staggering lack of trust in American journalism.
A Sept. 19 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press illustrates the depths to which the Fourth Estate has fallen from grace:
The public’s assessment of the accuracy of news stories is now at its lowest level in more than two decades of Pew Research surveys, and Americans’ views of media bias and independence now match previous lows.
Just 29% of Americans say that news organizations generally get the facts straight, while 63% say that news stories are often inaccurate. In the initial survey in this series about the news media’s performance in 1985, 55% said news stories were accurate while 34% said they were inaccurate. That percentage had fallen sharply by the late 1990s and has remained low over the last decade.
Similarly, only about a quarter (26%) now say that news organizations are careful that their reporting is not politically biased, compared with 60% who say news organizations are politically biased. And the percentages saying that news organizations are independent of powerful people and organizations (20%) or are willing to admit their mistakes (21%) now also match all-time lows.
Okay, so we’ve established that we’re dissatisfied with the current state of journalism. But what can we do about it?
