Study: Media shifts to opinion, advocacy, ‘personal perspective'
That shift many have sensed from hard news to opinion and advocacy in the media, especially on cable TV, is real, according to a new and authoritative report from research giant Rand Corporation.
In a study of trends from before 2000 to 2017, it found a big shift in how news is presented on TV and in online reports that means more “personal perspective,” issue advocacy, and opinion.
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Rand, in its report News in a Digital Age, compared the periods for newspapers, broadcast TV, cable, and online. It looked at the words used, but did not analyze the politics of the stories, reporters, or outlets.
Newspapers, it said, have shifted in how they tell their stories, away from the old who, what, when, where, why and how approach to storytelling and personal perspective.
Broadcast has shifted to offering more opinions and arguments.
Cable TV has gone all in on opinion over news.
And online has become opinionated and advocacy based.
The key findings by platform in recent coverage:
- Newspapers: “We found that post-2000 reporting engaged in more storytelling and more heavily emphasized interactions, personal perspective, and emotion.”
- Broadcast TV: “Our analysis found a gradual shift in broadcast television coverage from more conventional reporting in the pre-2000 period, during which news stories tended to use precise and concrete language and often turned to public sources of authority, to more subjective coverage in the post-2000 period, which relied less on concrete language and more on unplanned speech, expression of opinions, interviews, and arguments.”
- Cable news: “Compared with news presentation on broadcast television, programming on cable outlets exhibited a dramatic and quantifiable shift toward subjective, abstract, directive, and argumentative language and content based more on the expression of opinion than on reporting of events. This was accompanied by an increase in airtime on cable channels devoted to advocacy for those opinions rather than on balanced description of context.”
- Online news: “Language in the online journalism sample tended to be more conversational, with more emphasis on interpersonal interactions and personal perspectives and opinions. Appeals were less narrative and more argumentative, with an eye toward persuasion.”
The Rand report was an offshoot of its 2018 report on the media, Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life.
Rand said that report “called into question the meaning and purpose of news” and said that there was a “blurring of the line between fact and opinion.”
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