A new poll finds a big gap between the public and a group of journalists surveyed — and it’ll provide plenty of talk radio, cable and blog material for years to come.
In one finding, 43% of the public says the press has too much freedom, while only 3% of journalists agree. And just 14% of the public can name “freedom of the press” as a guarantee in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, in the major poll conducted by the University of Connecticut Department of Public Policy.
NOT good news for the press. This means gradual encroachments on press freedoms could succeed in the U.S. They would just have to be gradual enough not to create a big controvery. Incremental one. This is not good news for members of ANY political party. More:
Six in ten among the public feel the media show bias in reporting the news, and 22% say the government should be allowed to censor the press.
So in addition to an erosion in the belief in a free press, nearly 1/4 polled would go along with government censorship of the press. And:
More than 7 in 10 journalists believe the media does a good or excellent job on accuracy — but only 4 in 10 among the public feel that way. And a solid 53% of the public thinks stories with unnamed sources should not be published at all.
And on BLOGS and BLOGGERS?
Perhaps the widest gap of all: 8 in 10 journalists said they read blogs, while less than 1 in 10 others do so. Still, a majority of the news pros do not believe bloggers deserve to be called journalists.
Next comes the section you are SURE to hear about on radio talk shows for the next four years:
Asked who they voted for in the past election, the journalists reported picking Kerry over Bush by 68% to 25%. In this sample of 300 journalists, from both newspapers and TV, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 3 to 1 — but about half claim to be Independent. As in previous polls, a majority (53%) called their political orientation “moderate,” versus 28% liberal and 10% conservative.
But E&P had this cautionary note:
However, the journalist part of this new poll, as with so many previous ones, seems to weigh its sample much too heavily toward managers, and so may not represent a true cross-section in the profession.
And there’s this disconnect between journalists as a group and the public: in the sample, “roughly 90% of the journalists had a college degree — versus only 23% of the general public Plus bad news for the print media:
Newspaper relevance in the average American’s news diet appears to have slipped, with 61% of non-journalists using television as their main new source, and only 20% citing newspapers.
And BLOGS?
Blogs showed their growing influence among those polled, as 83% of journalists reported the use of blogs, with four out of 10 saying they use them at least once a week. Among those who use them, 55% said they do so to support their news-gathering work. And even though 85% believe bloggers should enjoy First Amendment protections, 75% say bloggers are not real journalists because they don’t adhere to “commonly held ethical standards.”Overall, 61% of the news pros say that the emergence of the Internet has made journalism better.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.