by William Powers

The Extrapolation Fallacy

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The media took their own temperature again this week, and the bad news is, we're still really sick. The Project for Excellence in Journalism released its second annual State of the News Media report, an enormous (600-plus pages) compendium of trends, content analysis, and polling data about the saddest, most downtrodden of elite American professions. I went immediately to the section on "Public Attitudes," to see if we hacks are as loathed as ever by the people we're supposedly serving. And how:

"People have long considered the press sensational, rude, pushy, and callous. But in the last 17 years, they have also come to see the press as less professional, less moral, more inaccurate, and less caring about the interests of the country."

It's a bad time for the media to be unpopular, particularly in the old establishment journalism camp, which is under siege from all directions. As the report grimly noted:

"It may be that the expectations of the press have sunk enough that they will not sink much further. People are not dismayed by disappointments in the press. They expect them. That is hardly a base on which to build, particularly as the traditional press ... begins to have to contend not only with Republicans who deride it as liberal, but with liberals who deride it as cowed by Republicans, and bloggers who deride it as out of touch."

Maybe I'm just another out-of-touch journalist, but I have a hard time sharing the public's sense of disappointment in the media. I wake up each day and read two excellent national newspapers in hard copy, plus several very good papers online. I know exactly where to go on the radio dial—both satellite and broadcast—for news I generally trust and enjoy. The world-scouring machines behind Google News deliver a rich, endlessly changing menu of just-the-facts wire copy, meatier mainstream news reports and opinion columns, clever guerrilla-journo fare from the blogs, and even raw press releases—a special thrill for lovers of unfiltered "news"—to my computer screen. I like some blogs so much, I have to restrain myself from visiting too often. And there are more news channels on my cable service than I care to count (or watch).

Just 20 years ago, this would have seemed like some news junkie's impossible sci-fi dream. Now it's here and—everyone hates it?

Reports like the Pew-funded study work hard to figure out why, and they suggest many partial answers: the nonstop news scandals, the suspicions of bias, the general sense of media upheaval, and widespread confusion about what exactly constitutes news.

I think there's another factor that research studies can't pick up, because it's inchoate and unmeasurable. It involves a way of thinking about the media that we all learned growing up in a time when there were just a handful of truly powerful American news operations. Those big old newspapers and networks of our childhood were remarkably similar in point of view, and they constituted an elite class unto themselves.

And because media power rested in so few outlets, everything they said and did was, by definition, significant and had far-reaching consequences. If one of the giants did something stupid or wrong—a wildly inaccurate story, or a decision to air a sitcom instead of a presidential speech—it was not unreasonable to fret about "the media" as a whole. In a world of only a dozen major-leaguers, when just one makes a big goof, a pretty big swath of the trade has tripped up. It's simple math.

Those old media powers are still around, and are still highly influential. But they are not the only game in town anymore, not by a long shot. Just in the last decade, there's been a dazzling proliferation of new outlets on cable, the Internet, and lately, radio. Now, if one outlet commits an outrage—whether it's CBS News or a single blogger—it's no longer mathematically correct to extrapolate the goof to everyone else. Because there are too many everyone elses. You just can't generalize about such a many-headed beast.

Even talking about "the media" is beginning to seem absurd. Yet we still do it every day, as if it were still 1985. We turn on the TV or wander the Net and happen on a particular news outlet doing something dumb or least-common-denominator—like, say, spending all day on the Michael Jackson trial—and our 20th-century-trained brains conclude that everything is going to pot: The media are a disaster. For some reason, the simple act of consuming news brings out the paranoid pessimist in everyone. Liberals see Fox News and reckon that the whole media cosmos is heading that way. Conservatives see Dan Rather's ignominy and have the same thought in reverse: They're taking over. "They" is The Other, The Evil Ones.

In fact, nobody's taking over. That's the point of the proliferation. There are serious, fair-minded news outlets, and there are appalling downmarket outlets. There are more of both than there were a few decades ago, and a million new gradations in between. We're all free to take our pick. And as we pick, new audience patterns will emerge, and new clusters of power and influence will rise and fall.

Eventually, people will learn not to confuse the one with the many, but it's going to take some time. The media are evolving faster than we are.