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Nov
29
Hattip to Wendy Hoke at Creative Ink for this post that draws attention to this Editor & Publisher article, “Study: More Than 60% Don’t Trust Campaign Coverage.” You can download the full report as a pdf here.
Other findings, according to E & P:
The findings were among those in Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership National Leadership Index. The survey, which included interviews with 1,207 adults nationwide in September, focuses mostly on leadership issues. But a portion of the findings asked about views on the media in relation to leadership, with some troubling results.
“Our survey finds a pervasive lack of confidence in the leadership of many sectors of society,” the report states. “But Americans give their lowest marks to leaders in the press. Americans are particularly dissatisfied with press coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign.”
When asked if election coverage was politically biased, 40% believed it was too liberal; 21% too conservative; and 30% found it neutral. Nine percent of those responding were not sure.
Key among the findings:
• 64% of those polled do not trust press coverage of the presidential campaign.
• 88% believe that campaign coverage focuses on trivial issues.
• 84% believe that media coverage has too much influence on American voting choices.
• 92% say it is important that the news media provide information on candidates’ specific policy plans, but 61% say the media does not provide enough coverage of policy plans.
• 89% say it is important to hear about candidates’ personal values and ethics, but 43% say there is not enough coverage of personal values and ethics.
None of this is news. It’s confirmation.
We have to look at who benefits from the coverage being this way – because it’s not us.
Then we must decide what we can do to change what we’re being fed. We have to spit it out, reject it, not fund it and otherwise neutralize and/or eliminate that which keeps it alive.
You know, food producers are dumping ingredients that lead to transfat. We need to get the campaign info producers to do the same – to dump the transfat ingredients or those ingredients that lead to transfat.
Who are the food producers in campaign coverage and what ingredients should they be encouraged to use instead of transfat or transfat-producing ingredients?
What are you willing to do to help catalyze this change? How would you go about it?
By Jill Miller Zimon at 5:09 pm November 29th, 2007 in Politics
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4 Responses to “Harvard says: 88% say campaign coverage focuses on the trivial, media overinfluences”
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Love it! That’s what I do too.
Get the FCC to start doing its friggin job and break up these large media cartels. Without any real competition, they can spew out whatever message they want.
I tend to feel the same way, Craig but don’t you get the sense that the cartels don’t want to be broken up? How do we convince the powers that be that they should be? All these years after the AT&T break-up, what did we accomplish?