by Andrew Kohut
Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, writes regularly for CIR about public attitudes toward the media.

The acquisition of news media companies by diversified corporations and their possible future marriages to Internet companies loom as troubling components of public distrust of the media.

This is despite the fact that less than half (45 percent) of the public took notice of the proposed AOL-Time Warner merger, according to the Pew Research Center news interest survey.

The public has a long-standing suspicion that news organizations are not as independent of outside interests as they claim. I first learned this while conducting focus groups in the mid-1980s about the then newly-minted "credibility crisis." Our roundtable respondents forcefully told us that the news media were often influenced, if not pushed around, by powerful people and organizations. Having spent years listening to politicians and business leaders complain about an over-adversarial media, I chalked this up to the vagaries of the groups we had gathered for our in-depth discussions. But the results of subsequent nationwide surveys bore out what we found in the focus groups. Most Americans in our representative survey at that time believed the press was "often" influenced by power structures -- 65 percent thought advertisers influenced the press, 70 percent cited business, and 73 percent even described the federal government as often bossing the press around.

That was more than fifteen years ago and the public has gotten more, not less distrustful of the press. Opinion may worsen when it dawns on the public that many of America's top news organizations are small cogs in giant corporate wheels. For now, it's largely below the public's radar. Only 37 percent of respondents in a Pew nationwide survey conducted last December knew that General Electric owned broadcast outlets. This was almost the same percentage that knew Dow Jones owned a news organization. Curiously, a much higher 60 percent identified Disney as a news media owner. Whether that reflected knowledge of the ABC link, or a readily implicit association between the news media and the world of fantasy, was not clear from the survey results.

Even without making the big corporate connections, many Americans today think the press is too concerned with the interests of the companies that own them, and the interests of their advertisers as well. Fully 42 percent of Pew's respondents in December described protecting the business interests of owners as a major problem with news organizations these days. And 35 percent said the same about protecting the interests of advertisers. Wealthier and older Americans are more alarmed about this than the young. Fifty percent of those sixty-five and older think the media are too concerned with owners' business interests compared with 36 percent among younger adults. Older respondents are also more concerned than the young about whether the media are too aware of advertiser interests.

This same survey found that many people worry that the press may be a lap dog, rather than a watchdog, when bosses' interests are involved. Still, the top complaint about the press was: it is overly focused on reporting the misdeeds and personal failings of public figures (see box). In other words, the public faults the press for being too much of a watchdog when it comes to the pols, but suspects it may turn a blind eye to problems when its owners' corporate interests are at stake. More episodes like Times Mirror's involvement with the Staples Center, and a growing recognition that those who assign and report the news are little fish in big corporate seas, can only stir up long-standing doubts about the press's independence.

Journalists themselves are worried about this. Nearly three-quarters of journalists employed by national news organizations said that buyouts by diversified corporations are having a negative effect on journalism today. Concerns about corporate ownership at this point are mostly about financial pressure, not conflicts of interest. Almost half said that increased bottom-line pressure is hurting the quality of news coverage. On the other hand, an even larger majority of national journalists -- 68 percent -- said corporate owners have little or no influence on what stories they cover or emphasize, and 77 percent consider advertisers to have virtually no say in stories they pursue. But the single biggest concern of journalists these days -- the credibility crisis -- could worsen given the public's doubts about these claims.

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe