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During the past 20 years, increasing numbers of academic studies, industry studies, and public opinion polls have assessed relative levels of public learning from news media and public perceptions of U.S. news media's accuracy, believability, credibility, bias, honesty, and other characteristics. From the early 1980s, if not earlier, until the mid- to late 1990s, local television outscored newspapers. Newspapers are now gaining because of decreasing quality in local television news, even if the public believes newspapers are getting better. The article suggests that cognitive dissonance and low media literacy were largely responsible for the intervening overrating of television.
Keywords: local television news; newspapers; media credibility; media performance; public opinion
During the past several decades, the U.S. newspaper industry (through its trade organizations), individual newspaper groups, and individual newspapers have commissioned study after study comparing and contrasting the American public's attitudes toward and behaviors with newspapers versus television. Journalism and other professors who study the news media and/or public opinion also have conducted their own studies on these questions. But as one can tell from the industry's interest, these studies are not of merely theoretical concern. The U.S. newspaper industry and those who believe in an important, even unique, role for newspapers are concerned about the long-term future of the industry-which some know has been consolidating for nearly a century.
These studies try to track a moving target in more ways than one: The newspaper industry and then the television industry each became concerned with declining interest among news consumers and eventually, neither the newspaper industry nor television news professionals could blame a declining audience on the other because the audiences were declining for each. Second, the 1980s saw the near disappearance-relatively quickly-of locally reported and broadcast radio news, the launching of one national newspaper (USA Today), and the significant expansions of two others (The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal). Third, the 1990s saw the fest expansion and popularization of the World Wide Web, changes in local newspapers due to changes in national newspapers, the launching or expansion of all-news cable stations, and the decline in international news being covered by local or national broadcast news.
An examination of industry and academic studies of the period in hindsight suggests that much of...