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The Media and the Public in the United States: The Failure of Opinion
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11042 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1986 |
5,457 Words |
| Author
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George Comstock
George Comstock is S.I. Newhouse Professor of Public
Communications at Syracuse University. This paper was
presented at the Seventh World Media Conference. Printed by
permission of the World Media Association. |
The study of public opinion about the mass media is a briskly percolating industry in the United States. Ordinarily, when we think of public opinion and the mass media, the questions asked concern the influence of the latter on the former. However, there has also been substantial and continuing--if irregular and to some degree hidden--inquiry into the opinions, beliefs, perceptions, and other cognitive and emotional responses of the public to the media. Every year, and increasingly so with each passing year, dozens of studies are undertaken to assess the evaluation of and satisfaction with the various mass media, and the prior and expected consumption of these media by the public. The typical method is the survey, although occasionally focus groups and more clinical methods are employed. Usually, samples are random, and therefore results can be generalized to some larger population from which the sample was drawn, although sometimes less costly in scope, but very often it is concerned with a particular market or area. These studies are hidden from the public and from the social and behavioral science community because they usually are proprietary and undertaken in order to market one or another of the mass media more successfully. They are not published even when they would be of considerable interest to the study of mass communications, because there is scant incentive for those in the private sector to publish academically. There nevertheless remains an important body of publicly available data on public opinion about the mass media. The occassional journalistic reports on proprietary research that appear in such publications as Broadcasting, Editor and Publisher, and Advertising Age suggest that these publicly available data do not tell a story that would be at all different were they enlarged by the addition of the proprietary research. This story, which at points is paradoxical and seemingly in conflict with itself, can be summarized in a series of eight propositions.
1.Public opinion about the media in many respects is contradictory and in few respects is there consensus.
Steiner (1963) reported that, while education was definitely correlated positively with being critical of commercial television entertainment and with expressed desire for more informational and new programming, education was definitely not positively correlated with watching a greater proportion of informational and new programming. That is, persons with a college education were more likely to offer or endorse statements critical of the medium, and more likely to declare or agree that they wanted more serious fare, but in fact were not all more likely to view more of the comparatively serous fare already available. These data, based
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