One more on the media

 While doing one of my recent posts, I looked at the Gallup report on their question about "trust and confidence in the mass media ... when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately, and fairly."  That report showed changes by party identification*:

The obvious feature is the growth of polarization since the late 1990s--the partisan gap has gone from about 10-15 percentage points to 50-60.  I haven't kept a systematic record, but offhand I can't think of any opinion question that's shown a bigger increase in partisan polarization.  There are a couple of other things that are worth noting:  

1.  Like Republicans, independents show a clear downward trend.  As a result, they are now closer to Republicans than they are to Democrats.  In the 1970s and 1990s they were about midway in between Democrats and Republicans--in 2022, they were about three times as far from Democrat as from Republicans.  This may be because people (especially people who aren't that interested in politics) tend to react to controversy by concluding you don't know who you can believe.  As a result, it's easier to make them lose trust than to gain trust.  

2.  There is some tendency for people to be more positive about the media when a president of the opposite party is in power.  The strongest case is with Trump, when Democratic confidence increased substantially and stayed high while he was in office--it also rose under Bush and declined under Obama.  It's harder to tell with Republicans because the trend is so strong, but the decline in trust seemed to slow down or stop under Obama, and there's been a slight increase under Biden.  Probably this occurs because the president gets a lot of attention, and news stories tend to focus on negative things, giving supporters of his party more to object to (and opponents more sense that the media is doing its job).  

The second point leads to a question about short-term changes in opinion:  do the opinions of Democrats and Republicans move together or in opposite directions?  One possibility is that there are changes in the general quality of news coverage, and people of all parties react to them in the same way--for example, confidence might have declined as it became clear that many stories about "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq had been inaccurate.  Then the opinions of Democrats and Republicans would move together, even though there would be a persistent difference between them.   This would be similar to assessment of current economic conditions--if unemployment or inflation increases, both Democrats and Republicans will rate the economy as worse.  Another possibility is that people react according to whether the news reflects well or badly on their side--for example, a negative story about Biden will cause Democrats to lose confidence and Republicans to gain confidence.  

To judge this, I computed the change from the previous year.  There was one case with a 21-year gap, which I discarded because change over a long period is dominated by the trend, and a few with a two-year gap, which I kept.  Comparing changes among Democrats and Republicans:

There is no association (the correlation is -.03), but it's not just noise--some of the individual changes make sense in terms of what was happening then.  In 2001 and 2009, supporters of the new president's party lost confidence in the media, and supporters of the other party gained.  In 2016, supporters of both parties lost confidence--presumably because of negative coverage of Trump for Republicans, and stories about Clinton's e-mails for Democrats.  In 2017, confidence in the media increased substantially among Democrats but also increased a little among Republicans, suggesting that some Republicans had qualms about Trump.  The changes among independents had positive correlations with both the changes among Democrats (.50) and Republicans (.21).  This pattern suggests that the changes are a mix of consensus and partisan reactions.  What if we looked at changes among independents to get a sense of the consensus part?  Sampling error has a large impact on those figures, but for what it's worth the biggest positive changes among independents are in 1974, 2017, and 2013; the biggest negative changes are in 2004, 2007, and 2012.

*The question has four possible answers, but the Gallup report collapses that into two, and the recent datasets aren't publicly available.  

Trust but verify

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about claims that people had lost faith in the media because of the coverage of the Russian collusion story--the basic idea is that the media kept saying that the Mueller report would be a bombshell, so when it turned out  to be inconclusive, people felt like they had been sold a bill of goods.  I looked at two measures of trust in 2016 and the present, and found only small declines in both.  Of course, a lot has happened since the collusion story was big (the Mueller report was issued in the spring of 2019),  so it would be better to consider some intermediate points as well.  I'll do that in this post, using three different measures.   First, from a survey conducted by the Edelman Trust Institute "how much do you trust [the traditional media] for news and information?"

I have to show it as a screenshot (from an article in Axios--I got the reference from Andrew Gelman's blog) because I don't have access to the original data.*  The figures on the x-axis are misleading, because they refer to the year of the annual reports, which involve a survey taken late in the previous year.  That is, the last survey in the figure was taken in late 2020.  As of late 2019 ("20" on the x-axis, trust was about the same level as in 2016--that is, it hadn't suffered during the time that the investigation was a big story.  It did fall a lot between late 2019 and late 2020--there are a lot of candidates for what might have caused that change.  

Second, the Reuters Digital News Report, which has annual surveys conducted early in the year.  I show results for two questions:  whether you can trust "most news most of the time" and whether you can trust "news sources that you use."

Trust in the news sources that you use has declined steadily--general trust in news rose from 2015 to 2017 and then declined steadily.  The 2019-20 decline was just about the same as the declines in 2017-8 and 2018-9.    

Finally, a question on trust in the media to report the news "fully, accurately, and fairly," measured on a four point scale.  Gallup has done this question annually (in September) in recent years, and a few other news organizations have asked it from time to time.

By this measure, confidence increased in the first years of the Trump administration, but then declined from 2018 to 2019.  You could say that was a reaction to the way the collusion story ended, but the declines have continued.  

There are some differences between the paths of the three measures, and since lots of things are happening at any time, it's difficult to identify the impact of any specific event.  But there's nothing here to support the idea that the inconclusive end of the collusion story caused confidence to collapse.  That implies that trust should have been substantially lower in the second half of 2019 than it was in 2016, which wasn't the case.  

*They had another question about whether you can trust the media to "do what is right,"  which I looked in my previous post.   The results for the question on "trust for news and information" are not regularly included on their annual report--that Axios story says the data were "shared exclusively with Axios."  (Edelman seems to be a management consulting firm which charges for access to their data--the reports just give a taste).  

[Some data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research] 

Getting what they deserve?

My last post questioned the claim that trust in the media dropped substantially during the Trump years.  The idea behind that claim is that trust will rise or fall depending on the performance of the media:  if they show bias, as some observers think they did with Trump, people will realize that and turn against them.   Many people treat this as just a matter of common sense.  But a recent essay by Louis Menand* suggests a different possibility.  He observes that during the 1950s, the press had a cooperative relationship with government officials:  where the "national interest" was involved, journalists largely accepted the official accounts, and didn't report information that they thought would be harmful.  This was particularly relevant to foreign affairs, but I think you can also see it in some domestic coverage--e. g., problems in the rollout of the polio vaccine.  On the other side, politicians and government officials were restrained in criticizing the media--they might object to particular stories, but they didn't make general attacks.  In the 1960s, the media started to get more aggressive and critical in its reporting, and government officials started pushing back--as a result, public trust in both sides declined.  That is, better news coverage (as judged by today's standards) led to less trust. 

This connects to a point I noticed when doing my last post:   the nations with the highest trust in the media, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer, are not the most democratic.  According to their  latest report, the top four countries for trust in the media are China, Indonesia, Thailand, and Kenya.  I don't have much faith in any opinion data from China, but the pattern is still clear without it.  The specific question they use is whether you trust the institution to "do what is right."  For many people, I think this means being "responsible"--emphasizing the positive, and downplaying or even suppressing information that might cause harm.  The other question I discussed in that post, whether you can "trust most news most of the time," doesn't seem to show the same negative correlation with democratic government--I think that's because in context people interpret "trust" as meaning that the news is accurate.  However, it doesn't seem to show a positive correlation either.  

Returning to the United States, I haven't been able to find any questions on general trust in the media until 1969, when Gallup asked "In presenting the news dealing with political and social issues, do you think that **** deal fairly with all sides or do they tend to favor one side?"  The question wasn't asked again until the mid-1980s, but since then it's been asked pretty often by several different survey organizations.  Originally they asked separate questions about newspapers and TV news--later surveys generally had one question about "news organizations."  The results, with higher values meaning more support for the "dealing fairly" option:

There is a clear downward trend.  However, it seems to have bottomed out in the early 2010s--that is, during the Trump years, people were more likely to say that news organizations dealt fairly with all sides than they had been during the Obama years.  The last time the question was asked was February 2020--a lot has happened since then, so it would be interesting to see what the results would be today.  However, the general point is that trust in the media didn't show a particular decline while Trump was president, and more generally doesn't seem to have many ups and downs--the rise in the late 2010s was the first clear departure from the trend.  

That is, whatever you think about the quality of media coverage of Trump, there's no sign that it led people to lost confidence in the media.  Or to put it another way, good journalism should be valued for its own sake, not because it will be greeted with public approval.

*And previously Michael Schudson's Why Democracies Need an Unlovable Press

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]  

  

Trust me?

 The Columbia Journalism Review recently published a long article by Jeff Gerth on media coverage of Donald Trump.  In the introductory section, Gerth says: "Before the 2016 election, most Americans trusted the traditional media and the trend was positive, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer. ...Today, the US media has the lowest credibility—26 percent—among forty-six nations, according to a 2022 study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism."  Confidence in the media has been in general decline for decades, according to the data I've seen, so the first sentence surprised me.   I checked the Edelman Trust Barometer and noticed that they have continued to survey trust, so you can look at how trust has changed since 2016.  The following figure shows trust in the media in 2016 and 2023 for nations in which both are available:

Trust in the media fell from 47% to 43% in the United States over the period.  Among all 25 nations in the sample, average trust fell from 49.3% to 46.9%.  So the US was a little below average at both times.  As far as change, the United States had a decline of 4%, which was not unusual--the mean change was a decline of 2.4%.  As far as the "positive trend" in 2016, the report says that trust in the media was higher than it had been in 2015.  The Edelman Trust Barometer apparently goes back to 2001, but there doesn't seem to be a convenient place to look up the data, so I didn't pursue that.  The main point is that it doesn't suggest that the American media suffered a particularly large decline in trust after 2016.  

Now for the Reuters study (the Digital News Report):  the United States did rank lowest, at 26%.  The Reuters data go back to 2016, so they can also be used to measure change.   A figure showing trust in 2016 (or the earliest year available) and 2022:

The United States has fallen in both absolute and relative terms, but the change wasn't that large--a decline of 6, when the average change was a decline of 2.5.  

  The samples are different, but about 20 nations appear in both.  Neither the scores nor the changes in the scores are highly correlated (the correlations are a little less than 0.2).  Perhaps that's because of a difference in the questions:  Edelman asks whether you trust the institution to "do what is right," while Reuters asks if they think you can "trust most news most of the time."  But both give the same conclusion about whether there's been a decline in trust in the American media:  some, but not an unusually large amount.  The comparison in the Gerth article is misleading--it treats the difference between two different questions as a change over time.  

Although the article was mostly an examination of media coverage rather than an analysis of public opinion, the passage I quoted was featured prominently and clearly pointed to a conclusion--that flaws in the coverage of Trump had produced a decline in public trust.  But regardless of what you think about the quality of coverage, it apparently didn't have much overall effect.  That may be because of political polarization--anything that made supporters of Trump feel more negative about the media made opponents feel more positive, and vice-versa.

 

Intelligence

 In 1944, the National Opinion Research Center asked "In general, do you think Negroes are as intelligent as white people--that is, can they learn just as well if they are given the same education?"  44% of whites said yes, 47% said no.  NORC asked the same question [adding "and training" starting in 1956] a number of times until 1968.  From 1965 until 1991, the Harris Poll sometimes asked people if they agreed or disagreed with the statement "Negroes [Blacks starting in 1971] have less native intelligence."  I combined the results into a figure showing the percent who thought that blacks were as intelligent as whites--that is, answered yes to the NORC question or disagreed with the Harris statement.  All the questions were asked of whites only.  I just include people with an opinion because some of the Harris results are from printed sources which presented them that way.

Both show a decline from about 1964/5 to 1968--perhaps a case of backlash against the civil rights movement?  However, the main pattern is a strong upward trend for both.  The Harris numbers were substantially lower, probably because the NORC added the "can learn just as well if they are given the same education."  Although "native intelligence" in the Harris question suggested the same idea, the way that the NORC question put it made it harder to miss.  

Finally, in 1990 the GSS asked people to rate different groups on a 1-7 scale running from "unintelligent" to "intelligent."  Blacks and whites were two of the groups.  The gap in average ratings of blacks and whites:

Until 2018, the GSS asked people if their race was black, white, or other, but they changed the way they asked about race in 2021.  I show the figures for whites only to make it comparable to the NORC and Harris results, but also those for all respondents in order to get 2021 in.  Either way, there is a strong trend towards equality.  In 1990, the most common combination among whites was 4 for blacks and 4 for whites (24.8%) and the second most common was 4 for blacks and 5 for whites (12%); in 2018, the 4/4 combination had risen to 44.8%, 5/5 was second at 13.4%, and 4/5 had fallen to 6.7%.   In 1990, about 15% saw a difference of 3 or more in favor of whites; in 2018, that was only 3%.*

Putting these results together, there has been a trend towards seeing blacks and whites as equal in intelligence running from the 1940s through today (although the fact that a trend could go on that long means that the gap was very large to start with).  Of course, you might say that the change could just involve social desirability bias rather than a change in real opinions.  However, as I've mentioned before, surveys are designed to be a low pressure situation--if people want to avoid the possibility that some person who they will never see again and who is just politely recording whatever they say is going to think that they are prejudiced, then it's reasonable to think that in natural settings they will try to avoid doing or saying things that might make people think that they are prejudiced.  So for most purposes, I don't think that it matters.  

*Among blacks, the average rating for white intelligence is 4.65 and the average rating for black intelligence is 4.57--the standard error is about .045.  

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]