Pubcasting helps audience sort fact, fiction
NPR, PBS audience holds most accurate views of Iraq
war, says new study
Pubcasters welcomed a study released Oct. 2 [2003] that showed people who turn to public broadcasting for news have the most accurate views of the Iraq war among media consumers.
The study, conducted by the polling firm Knowledge Networks and the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes, also highlighted differences between public broadcasting and its competitors. Fox News Channel and public broadcasting, for example, consistently landed at opposite ends of the spectrum of opinion. Fox viewers were almost four times more likely than public broadcasting’s consumers to hold misperceptions about the war (chart at right).
Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh seized on the study as a chance to mock NPR and PBS Oct. 8, the same day an irate Bill O’Reilly walked off NPR’s Fresh Air [story]. O’Reilly later told the Philadelphia Inquirer that he took a beating on Fresh Air because NPR and the “far left” are waging a “jihad” against Fox.
Pubcasters commenting on the study refrained from returning the culture-war volleys, though observers noted that the poll does bring out the contrasts between Fox’s brand of journalism and public broadcasting’s reporting.
“What it says is that you’ve got, for lack of better term, a more objective media” in public broadcasting, said Susan Moeller, a media professor at the University of Maryland. “It’s having more voices being heard, and so the listening public or viewing public is coming away from the newscast with the impression that there’s not just one way of looking at something.”
Others said misperceptions might stem in part from viewers choosing media
that tends to reinforce their beliefs.
Fox News declined a request for interview.
Not just ideology
The study found that two-thirds of about 3,000 respondents held at least one of three misperceptions:
Bush administration officials suggested that an Iraqi official met with al-Qaeda, but their claim has not been proven and was discredited by the U.S. intelligence community. No weapons of mass destruction have been found, and polls have shown that people in many countries opposed the United States going to war against Iraq without United Nations backing.
The study then broke down respondents by their primary news sources. Public broadcasting’s consumers consistently were the best informed, while Fox viewers were most likely to misperceive.
Education and political affiliation fail to account wholly for the differences. Republican Fox viewers, for example, were still more likely to hold misperceptions than Republican NPR and PBS subscribers.
Further, “48 percent of Democrat supporters who watch Fox News thought
the U.S. has found evidence of a direct link to al-Qaeda, but not one single
respondent who is a Democrat supporter and relies on PBS and NPR for network
news thought the U.S. had found such evidence,” the study said.
After Fox viewers, CBS viewers were the most likely to hold misperceptions,
yet CBS is more often accused of liberal, not conservative bias, noted Steven
Kull, PIPA’s director and the study’s principal investigator.
Ideology may still play a part, said Mike Clark, reader advocate at the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, Fla. “People are gravitating to news sources that they personally agree with, so that they may never come in contact with info that might challenge their assumptions,” he said.
“It’s possible that it’s just somehow driven by networks presenting issues in a way that’s more comfortable to listen to. We don’t know,” Kull said. “But we can say that it isn’t simply a function of the ideological bias of the viewers.”
Bias or balance?
Kull said the study does not prove PBS and NPR deserve all the credit for accurate perceptions held by their audiences. “But there’s no way you cannot believe that it’s a positive indicator,” he said.
Pubcasters likewise took the study as good news. Jeffrey Dvorkin, NPR’s ombudsman, called it “very flattering.” “We’ll take any compliments we can get these days,” he said.
“We go out of our way to make sure that we provide in-depth information and give people more sides of the story. So we actually find it gratifying,” said Rob Flynn, director of communications for PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
Like Flynn, Kull and Moeller suggested public broadcasting’s style of news presentation might partly explain results.
“Within a single news piece, [public broadcasting] does better than others at capturing not just . . . the two sides, but multiple sides in a policy matter or even in an event that has just broken,” Moeller said. “Fox, being more headline news-oriented, tends to be repeating the same piece of information over and over again. You don’t get the sense of what other experts are saying, or what the second-day story might have been.”
On PBS and NPR, “you don’t have people who are presenting news in a sort of highly charged, opinionated kind of environment,” Kull said.
Limbaugh’s highly charged, opinionated website characterized PIPA’s work as “the silly study that concluded Fox News viewers are stupid.” Limbaugh said Fox had never deliberately promoted the misperceptions. He also bet that PBS and NPR were not reporting that a recent review of Iraq’s weapons programs showed that “it’s undeniable that a weapons of mass destruction program existed.”
A caller to Limbaugh’s show who called himself Gary suggested, “Let’s
take a sample of NPR listeners and see what percentage of them believes flagrantly
false propositions about U.S. history or economics or any other subject.”
Limbaugh named Gary “Caller of the Day.”
Rather than concede that public broadcasters might be the most accurate journalists,
Limbaugh tried to paint them as the most left-wing. But Flynn, for one, denied
the NewsHour belongs at the end of the political spectrum.
The NewsHour often receives criticism of its coverage from all sides of the issues, Flynn said. “We get enough feedback from viewers that forces us to realize we’re about in the middle, despite what conventional wisdom you want to believe,” he said.
Pubcasting attracts charges of lefty bias because it includes a wider range of voices and stories than other media, Moeller said. “If you look at the range of experts, it still tends to skew pretty centrist and not liberal at all—and not particularly conservative at all either,” she said. “But it is not just following the [Bush] administration’s line.”
Posted Nov. 3, 2003
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