The issue has been studied exhaustively by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) in a large number of polls conducted since early 2003. Here s one of their studies on the correlation between the way a person gets their news and the number of misconceptions they have about Iraq. You can find plenty more on the PIPA website.
A very recent poll by Pew Research Centre found that people who read newspapers and watch are the most knowledgeable about political affairs, while people who get their, er, information from FOX News were the least knowledgeable. An older study from Leeds University on knowledgeability about the first Gulf War found: TV news seems to confuse more than it clarifies. Even after controlling for all other variables, we discovered that the correlation between TV watching and knowledge was actually quite often a negative one.
[O]verall, the more TV people watched, the less they knew. A September 2003 study of CNN found that a given hour of broadcasting contained less than minutes of actual news reporting. The rest of the time was taken with repeating headlines, informercials, commercials, tabloid stories, talk show content, and so on.
Varieties of Faux News Another problem is the documented rise in fake news, government and/or corporate propaganda that is delivered to TV networks and broadcast as if they produced it themselves. As traditional news providers are under more competition from new technology news providers, they are increasingly turning, according to the latest annual study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, to business models, niche marketing, and so on to compete. As a result, the news they provide is gradually becoming less straight and more entertaining, which risks making it less useful.
The consequences of this narrowing of focus involve more risk than we sense the business has considered. Concepts like hyper localism, pursued in the most literal sense, can be marketing speak for simply doing less. Branding can also be a mask for bias.
This is also evident in the vast increase in so-called "celebrity news", which consumes a remarkable share of "news" reporting with entertaining fluff that distracts attention and crowds out reporting on events that can actually affect people s lives. The negative corelation between TV viewing and accurate knowledge seems to apply more generally. Here are just a few examples: A study by the American Journal of Managed Care found that TV news, and especially local TV news, does a poor job of reporting health news.
Local television news devotes significant airtime to health stories, yet few newscasts provide useful information, and some stories with factually incorrect information and potentially dangerous advice were aired. Another study, this time from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, found that the more TV children and adolescents watch, the more confused they are about what foods are healthy to eat. It s not too hard to conclude that when you get most of your news from a single source - a single newspaper or a single TV station - you re going to miss a lot.
If you get your news from a constellation of sources, which is most easily achieved via the Internet, it s a lot easier to get the variety, cross-checking, back-and-forth dialogue, reader responses, and so on, that are required to catch and debunk errors. I m not aware of any controlled studies on the superiority of the Internet as a broad-spectrum news source, but consider the following data points: Much of the content of news websites is produced by conventional newsmedia (newspaper, magazines, and TV) as an online projection of their traditional news gathering and reporting business. Most of the content of blogs/social websites cites its sources.
In other words, you can check if an article really said what a commentator claims it said with a click of a button. When you get your news online, it s a lot easier to get news from a very wide variety of sources. Social networking sites like Reddit, news aggregators like Google News and Yahoo!
News, and RSS readers make this very easy. To be sure, it s possible to spend all of your time in a single online news "ghetto"; but if you decide you want to diversify, it s a lot easier than with print newspapers or TV networks. I can read the Globe and Mail The issue has been studied exhaustively by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) in a large number of polls conducted since early 2003.
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