These are not good years for the newspaper industry. Circulation is down, newspapers are folding all over the country, the Internet looks like it will change journalistic output as we know it, but there is a more insidious problem: people do not trust newspapers. A newspaper's credibility -- its ability to convince its readers that what it prints is as close to the truth as it is humanly possible to be -- is its very life blood. Without credibility, a newspaper is worth nothing, and indeed can barely still be called a newspaper. That is why it should and surely does trouble newspaper editors and reporters that the latter half of the 20th Century has seen a steady decline in public trust in newspapers, along with a concomitant increase in the public's trust in television news. It could be argued that lower readership is a result of lack of public trust, but more likely, as will be seen below, this lack of public trust in newspapers is a function of their declining readership base.

While there is evidence that the trend has slowed down in recent years, the public still by and large sees television as more credible than newspapers. The ultimate purpose of this paper is to discern how it is that the public, in television's era of heightened glitz and razzle-dazzle and lower levels of serious content, holds this view. This is best achieved by first studying the credibility gap itself.

The Credibility Gap

In 1959, more Americans surveyed said they found newspapers to be more credible than television. Since that year, however, the opposite has been true, and except for minor fluctuations, the trend has been consistently in favor of television.¹ According to a 1989 poll 49 percent of the public said they preferred television as the most believable, by contrast, newspapers received only 26 percent in the same survey, trailing behind both were radio, at 7 percent, and magazines with five percent.² The Washington Post reported in 1997 that an abysmal 22 percent of 1,003 randomly-selected adults have "a lot" of trust in the daily newspaper in their area. In fact, the only institution to be trusted less than newspapers was the government! It should be pointed out, though, that local television news broadcasts were only trusted "a lot" by a mere 24 percent of those same adults, a score so close to that of newspapers that many would probably consider the difference between the two negligible.³

The news for print is not all bad, though. On the bright side, a plurality of Americans surveyed (42 percent) said they though their local newspapers had improved over the past five years, compared with 30 percent who thought their local papers had gotten worse.⁴ Fifty-one percent of the respondents to the survey said they thought they spent more time reading the newspaper in 1996 than they did five years before, while 38 percent said they spent less time.⁵ This may be, because people tend to read the paper more as they get older. Thus, while each individual reads more after every five-year interval, each successive generation spends less time as a whole. (In other words, 30-year-olds read more in 1996 than they did when they were 25, but they read less than people who were 30 in 1991.) Of course, this view of the public may not have anything to do with credibility.

However, these figures must be taken with a grain of salt. That grain is that people report similar sentiments for television. People tended to say TV news (ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC) has gotten better over the past five years (53 percent). Interestingly, the top reason for why people thought TV had improved was the same reason why people thought newspapers had improved: more in-depth coverage.⁶ Only 18 percent of the people surveyed thought television news had declined. This small figure flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which says that TV is in a downhill spiral toward ratings-mongering and sensationalism. Perhaps it is the elites who are able to have their voices heard that believe television is in a decline, while the populace as a whole does not. This makes sense, because ratings would not be going up if everybody thought TV was overly sensationalistic.

Similar to newspapers, 56 percent of the people surveyed said they thought they watched more TV now than five years ago, versus 32 percent who said they watched less. Local news fared much the same as national newscasts, which 53 percent of the respondents stating they thought their local news had improved and 57 saying they watched it more in 1996 than five years ago.⁷

Television's Flaws

The general trend looks bad for newspapers, and that is bad for society, according to many scholars. Television news is frequently derided in a number of ways. Most segments last less than one minute, they say, and that is in a state of constant shrinkage. Furthermore, soundbites, or short snippets of speeches by politicians and others usually take less than 10 seconds. Political culture cannot survive in this kind of environment, they feel. That means that elites who can manage to sit through a half hour of C-Span will be much more able to engage in the public discourse than the bulk of society who only watches network news. This creates a polarization of society into the information-haves and -have nots. Television news, dominated by the soundbite and the feeding frenzy, leads to a dumbing-down of society, as the conventional wisdom in academia goes.

W. Lance Bennet, for example, formulates that there are four inherent "biases" in TV news (and sometimes newspapers to the extent that they are pushed toward these biases by television) today: 1) "Personalization." The national media focus on individual actors like the president and the Fed chairman, instead of looking at issues that cannot be attached to a personality. Thus, the executive branch gets four times as much coverage as congress, its constitutional equal. 2) "Dramatization." All stories become melodramas designed to keep the viewer interested. 3) "Fragmentation." The focus of news is on small, compelling pieces of full ("real") stories, giving people an altered sense of what is important. 4) "Normalization." News is presented as first a problem, and finally a solution (or a "we're working on it") is given by officials, leading everyone to think that everything is OK, when in reality only one small piece of a problem is being fixed.⁸ Critic Larry J. Sabato notes that TV is obsessed with petty things like Donna Rice and Gary Hart, instead of important things like health care and welfare reform. While there is truth to all these accusations of television, the public is apparently not phased by any of them.⁹

In this age of television dominance, it is easy to understand why more people spend more time watching television than reading the newspaper: It is simply an easier activity, watching TV takes less effort than reading a newspaper, and, as will be discussed below, TV is more stimulating, thus providing people more of an incentive to watch. But the question remains as to why the public believes it more.

Understanding the Gap

As the percentage of people relying primarily on television news has increased, so too has the percentage of people who say TV is the most believable medium. Back when newspapers were the most widely-disseminated form of media they were seen as more credible than television which was then in its infancy. This fact leads to the hypothesis that people believe what they most frequently use for information. "Newspapers are seen as an elitist source. A lot of people feel that newspapers don't write for them," said Georgetown University Associate Professor of Government Diana Owen, an expert in modern media trends.¹⁰

All their dedication to objectivity, and their separation of opinions from straight news still cannot match television in reputation for credibility. Perhaps it is not that newspapers are seen as biased, but that the public is just generally more familiar with TV personalities than with newspaper writers. Thus, if faced with conflicting information, they go with those who they know, those who enter their family rooms on a daily basis. I have heard the joke that Bob Woodward can get away with quoting anonymous sources because his reputation is so widely-respected that he becomes the source himself. This same principle applies on a grand scale to all television reporters. They are famous enough to become sources.

More important, however, is the very nature of the two media. Television, a moving picture accompanied by narration, is much more visually stimulating than even the most flashy of color newspapers. If it is often said that a picture is worth a thousand words, a moving picture must be worth a million. What one skilled or lucky cameraman can show with 15 seconds of video tape can take a print reporter 15 column inches to describe.¹¹ There is the logical fear that in this description, the reporter will inadvertently or even purposely leave out important details. "The bottom line is that if you can see it you can believe it," Owen said.¹² Simply, if faced with conflicting information in TV and newspapers, most people go with what they can plainly see. In some cases this may be a mistake, but it is a natural human intuition.

It sometimes barely matters what the TV reporter is saying if the pictures are vivid and telling enough. This is true not just in spot news of a bus hijacking or a mudslide, but in investigative reports. An undercover camera that captures an illicit deal is easier to grasp and more visceral than reading a story about the same incident. This marginalization of the television reporter actually works to TV's advantage. The less human involvement in the production of a unit of news, be it electronic or print, the less room for biases or inadvertent mistakes to creep in. Since TV reporters are merely providing context for the film that forms the basis of the story they have less room to err than the print reporter who must describe the entire event. Even if the broadcast journalist does make a mistake in objectivity, the viewers may not catch it. "Pictures have little difficulty in overwhelming words and short-circuiting introspection."¹³

Also, print reporters and television reporters alike are assigned "beats" to cover, so that the reporter becomes more familiar with the subject that he or she covers. According to Owen, this fact also works to the disadvantage of newspapers but has no effect on television's credibility. "There is a perception that newspapers can be biased because [readers look at the] byline, and the reporter is associated with their beat," and is influenced by the people he or she covers on a daily basis. Newspaper reporters are seen as somehow acting in collusion with their sources, even though they may have a high degree of animosity with them. For television, however, this is not a problem because, as mentioned above, people tend to believe that the reporter simply does not have enough control over the news segment to be able to insert bias.¹⁴ The single biggest reason why people thought their local newspapers had declined in the past five years was perception of bias. Twenty-eight percent of those people who responded said they thought their local paper had some kind of bias, broken down in the following ways: 12 percent said their paper just was not objective enough, 8 percent thought it was too liberal, 6 percent though it was "not credible," and 2 percent said it was "too opinionated." By contrast, a mere 1 percent of them admitted they thought their local paper was too boring to read.¹⁵ We must turn, now, to a specific study of one story that was played by both papers and television to determine if there are any significant differences between print and television coverage and if they mean one should consider one of the media inherently less biased.

A Comparative Analysis

Television excels at showing the important parts of a spot news story, but newspapers excel at telling the full story and why it happened. It is useful to compare a television newscast's script with a daily newspaper to demonstrate this phenomenon, and to try to see whether, in fact, television is less biased. While newspaper reporters and editors are obsessed with remaining unbiased, it is ironically the case that broadcast journalists are not so obsessed, probably because they do not have to be and people will still consider their broadcasts unbiased.¹⁶ Writes CBS Evening News Anchor Dan Rather: "I've always been fond of the maxim -- slightly paraphrased here -- that it's the journalist's duty to report the news and to raise hell."¹⁷ While there is nothing egregiously wrong with that statement, I cannot imagine it coming from the mouth of a print reporter. They would probably be more likely to say it was a journalist's job to report the news, and an editorial writer's job to raise hell.

On July 18, 1996 TWA Flight 800 mysteriously crashed into the waters of the Atlantic Ocean just outside of East Moriches, Long Island. World News Tonight, the evening newscast of ABC (and as we all know, "More Americans get their news from ABC News than from any other source") is worth comparing to major newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post. The fact that the entire transcript from a typical half-hour news broadcast can fit within the front page of The New York Times also works to the advantage of television. The less one says about a subject, the less that person is likely to show their bias. There is simply less room to make mistakes. A perusal of the ABC transcript from July 18, 1996 actually does help confirm this theory. There is so little time that all words must be devoted to pure facts. The only time ABC seems to have leaned toward the possibility that the flight was bombed or shot down with a missile rather than a simple accident. For example, at one point, correspondent John Donvan says, "But until the crash is officially called a crime ... ." That is a little presumptuous on his part, if it is true that it may never be called a crime, as indeed it never was. But this was not the worst presumption that was made by an ABC reporter.

Inappropriately, ABC reported that a letter was sent to a newspaper in Saudi Arabia that in some vague way may have forewarned of an attack. They chose to report the letter even though, "The State Department and the White House this evening are downplaying that report, saying to them it seems more related to Saudi Arabia than to anything that happened off the coast of Long Island last night."¹⁸ (Notice they do not tell us who at the State Department or White House they spoke to.) This is a similar rush-to-conclusion that had occurred after the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19, 1995, when TV news was criticized for immediately speculating that militant Palestinians were to blame for the bombing.

A final flaw with the television show is the flagrant self-aggrandizement that occurs throughout. Anchors and correspondents praise each other constantly, and tell how their news-gathering organization is working hard. Examples of this occur when Anchor Peter Jennings tells Correspondent John McWethy that they have both covered many disasters together and that therefore, McWethy is qualified to judge the severity of the accident,¹⁹ and when Peter Jennings, the day before, tells the audience that ABC News has been covering the crash all day and all night.²⁰ One would never see a newspaper correspondent begin a story in the following fashion: "I have been stationed here in Jerusalem for 12 years, but never have I seen something this horrific." That would be fine for a columnist or a guest Op-Ed writer, but totally inappropriate for the hard news section. This is another way in which opinion and news are mixed on television.

In contrast to the TV report, The New York Times relied more on quotes from witnesses and from named government officials. The writer also quoted an Associated Press story. It described the jet in more detail, and contained nothing about the Saudi Arabian letter to the editor. The beginnings of the two stories are particularly telling. While the Times had a standard journalistic lede describing what happened to the plane, "A Trans World Airlines 747 airliner bound for Paris from New York City plunged in a fireball into the water off Long Island last night with more than 220 people aboard."²¹ It was simple, concise, and most important, precisely described what happened. Peter Jennings did not need to say all that. He simply began the program with: "There were no survivors." The eyewitness quotes the words from President Clinton before his opening explained enough of what everybody needed to know. Plus, by the time this broadcast came out, 22 hours had passed since the crash, so presumably most people knew about it.

Looking at what the print and TV chose to cover is also useful. The New York Times had a story about the crash itself, a feature about the witnesses, a special report on security in airports, a story about the search for bodies, and a story about how the crash hurts already-ailing TWA, and a box that listed the top 10 most deadly airline accidents. The Washington Post, geographically farther removed the site of the crash, ran a story only on the crash itself with a short sidebar on the search efforts. TV, instead, emphasized images, even stating at one point, "In every tragedy of this magnitude there are unforgettable images."²² World News Tonight, ran, in order, a segment on the crash itself, a segment on the bomb-theory speculation, one on the search for bodies, another on the witnesses, words from TWA spokesmen, a story about the emotional toll on families and how they were upset at TWA,²³ and a heart-wrenching piece about a small town in Pennsylvania that lost 16 French students and five adults, a piece about the Athens airport's lax security, and finally a piece looked at security for the Olympics in light of the disaster.²⁴

To summarize the comparative differences of the two media, it seems that although TV has some major problems that I pointed out, such as self-aggrandizement and a jump to conclusions about stereotypically terrorist groups, television contained about the same amount of information as newspapers, but a higher percentage of the information TV passed on was contained in pictures that speak for themselves instead of words written by a journalistic middleman or interpreter. Basically, what this showed us is that television reporters do not need to be as careful as print reporters about showing signs of opinion, because the public will keep coming back to TV, and because the role of the TV reporter is less crucial than that of the print reporter in the conveyance of information.

What Can Be Done?

So we must turn to the perplexing question of what newspapers can do collectively to remedy their image. Newspapers have for a long time been tackling the question of how to maximize their credibility. Innovations such as separating editorials from straight news and creating, as some papers have done, a position called "reader's representative" or "ombudsman" have made inroads toward increased credibility, but have not allowed papers to come close to surpassing television. It seems that editors and reporters have done everything humanly possibly to solve the problem of credibility shortage, but that is exactly the problem. Newspaper editors and reporters are mere humans, and must realize that as such they will be hard pressed to beat the flawless images of video.

While television obviously has a lot of flaws and a lot of critics, people just believe it more, see it as more real because they watch it more, and partly because there is less human intervention with the raw material of news. That is not going to change any time soon. It is a fact of life people in the newspaper industry must come to accept.

¹Ansolabehere, 45.

²Roper, 15.

³Morin.

⁴Pew, 70.

⁵Pew, 71.

⁶Pew, 72.

⁷Pew, 74, 75.

⁸Bennett, 37-73.

⁹His book, Feeding Frenzy, coined a term and made him famous.

¹⁰Personal interview, May 5, 1997. Owen teaches, among other things, a course called "Media in American Politics."

¹¹A poor and non-standard measure of length, but the point should be clear.

¹²Personal interview, May 5, 1997.

¹³Postman, 103.

¹⁴Personal interview.

¹⁵Pew, 70.

¹⁶For example, news anchors will often throw little editorial comments after a reporter's story, such as "that's just wonderful," or "let's hope that doesn't happen again." These comments would never make it into newspaper's hard news story.

¹⁷Rather, 92.

¹⁸Transcript of ABC World News Tonight, July 18, 1996.

¹⁹Trascript.

²⁰Transcript of a special report, July 17, 1996.

²¹Kleinfield, A1.

²²Transcript, April 18, 1996.

²³Even using this totally rediculous quote: "I think there are two tragedies here -- the tragedy that, of course, occurred last night; but even a greater tragedy -- and that's the way we, the families, have been treated by TWA." That puts the loss of 230 lives on par with petty mismanagement and is probably the most outrageous quote they got.

²⁴Transcript.

ABC Breaking News. Peter Jennings. 17 July 1996.

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Barron, James. "Accidental Witnesses to Airborne Tragedy." The New York Times 18 July 1996: A1, B8.

Bennet, W. Lance. News: The Politics of Illusion. 3rd ed. White Plains, N.Y.: Longman Publishers, 1996.

Cushman, John H. Jr. "Precaution Measures at Airports Were Already on Increase." The New York Times 18 July 1996: B8.

Drozdiak, William. "Recover Efforts Hindered." The Washington Post 18 July 1996: A1.

Kifner, John. "Rushing to Pluck Sinking Bodies From a Waterlogged Hell." The New York Times 18 July 1996: B8.

Kleinfield, N.R. "T.W.A. Jetliner Leaving New York For Paris Crashes in Atlantic; More Than 220 Aboard." The New York Times 18 July 1996: A1, B8.

Morin, Richard. "Unconventional Wisdom: Whom Do You Trust?" The Washington Post 4 May 1997: C5.

Pew Research Center. "News Release: TV News Viewership Declines." 13 May 1996.

Phillips, Don. "747 Explodes With 229 Aboard Shortly After Takeoff from N.Y." The Washington Post 18 July 1996: A1, A19.

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Rather, Dan. "Journalism and the Public Trust." The Media and the Public. Ed. Casey Ripley, Jr. New York: H.W. Wilson Company, 1994. 92-98. (This article also appeared in The Humanist, Nov./Dec. 1990.)

Roper Organization. America's Watching. New York: Roper, 1989.

Sabato, Larry J. Feeding Frenzy: How Attack Journalism Has Transformed American Politics. New York: The Free Press, 1993.

World News Tonight. Peter Jennings. ABC, 18 July 1997.