I had a dispiriting exchange with a reader last week that underscores a disturbing reality among today’s news consumers.
The reader emailed after reading an article in Wednesday morning’s newspaper. “I am continually disappointed in the slanted reporting of The Oregonian,” she wrote. “The headline today ‘Idaho family at heart of deadly pro Trump rally’ for a Washington Post article is factually incorrect. The ‘rally’ did not go through the area where the killing occurred. This article and headline attempts to specifically tie the murder and the rally.”
I answer a lot of reader questions about what appears in The Oregonian and on OregonLive, and I am happy to do so – especially when we can have a civil conversation. I like to think we can all agree on the facts. But in this fractured time, I too frequently hear those facts roundly rejected.
A major survey released last month helps explain what’s going on.
The Knight Foundation, with Gallup, released results of its American Views 2020 survey, which found “deep pessimism” and “partisan entrenchment” about news media in the United States. This follows on a similar survey from two years ago.
The poll on “Trust, Media and Democracy” included more than 20,000 U.S. adults and, to this lifelong journalist, the results were sobering.
Not only do many Americans see bias in the media, they believe news organizations “actively support the partisan divide,” the Knight Foundation said in a summary of its findings.
“Party affiliation remains the key predictor of attitudes about the news media,” the summary said. “Republicans express more negative sentiments on every aspect of media performance compared to Democrats and independents.”
That lines up with my inbox and voice mail. I hear much more frequently from conservative readers who complain they see bias in our coverage (almost always our coverage of national political issues).
Let’s hear more from my emailer:
“My concern is that with the all desperate attempts by The Oregonian to paint Republicans and Trump supporters as ‘bad’ that what you are really doing is marginalizing The Oregonian’s reporting,” she wrote.
To recap the issue at hand, a caravan of Donald Trump supporters planned to stay on highways and freeways but diverted into downtown. The caravan of cars and pickup trucks proceeded through downtown Portland from east to west. After the caravan had left the area, a man who identified as an antifascist shot and killed a Patriot Prayer supporter who had taken part in the pro-Trump rally.
I responded to our reader several times, explaining a substantial part of the caravan did break off and go through downtown. When she protested further, I sent her links to videos of the event. She still pushed back on my “narrative.”
Here are a few more highlights (lowlights?) from the survey results:
--A majority of Americans see “a great deal” or a “fair amount” of political bias in the news they consume.
--Almost half say the media bears “'a great deal' of blame for political division” in the U.S.
--A whopping 54% believe reporters misrepresent the facts. Even more discouraging, 28% think reporters make up the facts.
I heard this from another reader, who pointed out a few errors in our coronavirus reporting.
“Human errors almost always produce random results,” he wrote. “Your errors all seem to be one-sided,” i.e. making the COVID-19 pandemic seem worse than it is.
After a data feed error overstated cases of coronavirus, he wrote again: “It is still interesting that all your glitches seem to favor more bad news. I’ve yet to see one of your glitches that shows things better than they are.”
I know with certainty the errors were not the result in any way of bias, but my correspondent was unswayed. He remained suspicious and that troubled me.
Our credibility is everything to us, and we are committed to getting it right. But levels of distrust in the news media are high.
Some of the problem lies at the feet of our social media “bubbles.” We tend to find our like-minded communities online, whether on Facebook or Twitter, and what we read reinforces our beliefs.
The survey found that about 40% of Americans pay attention only “to one or two trusted sources,” while a third rely on a variety of sources to find areas of agreement.
There is some good news from the survey. The vast majority of Americans, 84%, believe the news media is vital to democracy.
And more Americans are following local news. A third of Americans say they follow local news “very closely,” an increase from 25% two years ago. The survey was taken before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic and protests calling for racial justice so that number likely is even higher today.
The Knight Foundation notes the perils: "The low levels of public trust in the nation’s polarized media environment have left open the possibility for dangerous false narratives to take root in all segments of society during these emergent crises.
“At a time when factual, trustworthy information is especially critical to public health and the future of our democracy, the striking trends documented in these pages are cause for concern.”
I couldn’t agree more.
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Letter from the Editor: News media have work to do building trust - OregonLive
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