PJNet

Citizens are not the only ones disappointed with this election year’s coverage. Nearly three quarters of 500 members of the Committee of Concerned Journalists (CCJ) gave the press a C, D or F grade for its campaign coverage so far.

The CCJ did an informal survey to which 500 members responded. The CCJ press release says:

Fully 89% of journalists agreed (strongly or somewhat) that coverage has been “too reactive with little digging below the surface.” And a nearly identical 88% felt that coverage has been “trivialized by undue emphasis or lazy coverage of such side issues as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Kitty Kelly’s book or the CBS ‘memo-gate.’”

For overall election coverage:

…only 3% give the press an A grade, while another 27% give the news media a B. At the same time, 42% give the coverage a C and 27% say D or F.

It adds:

They give particularly low grades to television, be it local, cable or network, and much higher grades to newspapers and online coverage…

The survey also asked respondents to identify one positive thing:

…several items earned repeated mention. One was the debates. National Public Radio got several mentions for its coverage, the most of any single news organization. The weekly news magazines were also mentioned by a number of respondents for good coverage. Several people also mentioned growing use of “truth squadding” the campaign rhetoric and debate rhetoric as a positive development. Factcheck.org, a fact checking organization set up by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and staffed by veteran journalists and cited by members of both campaigns, also earned several mentions.

One respondent’s suggestion:

“Every newsroom should take a year and have a thoughtful, well informed series of discussions to answer the question: Is the way we do journalism helping or hurting our Democracy?”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 19th, 2004 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.