1 BROOKINGS/PEW RESEARCH CENTER FORUM THE BIENNIAL PEW MEDIA SURVEY: HOW NEWS HABITS CHANGED IN 2004 Tuesday, June 8, 2004 10:00 - 11:30 a.m. Washington, D.C. [TRANSCRIPT PRODUCED FROM A TAPE RECORDING] 2 C O N T E N T S Moderator: RON NESSEN Journalist in Residence, The Brookings Institution Presentation: ANDREW KOHUT Director, The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press Panelists: STEPHEN HESS Senior Fellow, Governance Studies, The Brookings Institution SUSAN PAGE Washington Bureau Chief, USA Today TOM ROSENSTIEL Director, Project for Excellence in Journalism 3 P R O C E E D I N G S MR. NESSEN: Good morning. Welcome to the Brookings Institution and welcome to this morning's forum, at which the Pew Research Center's biennial survey of the media habits of Americans is being released and discussed. This survey of 3,000 Americans was conducted between April 19th and May 12th. And we want to give a special welcome this morning to those who are watching the forum on C-SPAN. In case anyone here in the audience didn't get one, there are copies of the survey just outside--embargoed for 10 o'clock, and it is 10 o'clock, so the embargo has been lifted. For those of you who are watching at home, the results are available on the Pew Web site. You can link to it from the Brookings Web site. And also, by this afternoon, you'll find on the Brookings Web site a full transcript of this forum. Our format this morning will be, first of all, Andy Kohut, the director of the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, will announce and explain the findings of the survey. And then our panel will offer their reflections on the results, their reactions, and will discuss the findings. Our panel this morning consists of Steve Hess, who is a senior fellow here at Brookings, who spends much of his time analyzing and commenting on news media issues; Susan Page, the Washington bureau chief of USA Today; Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. And I'm Ron Nessen, journalist in residence at Brookings, and I'll be the moderator for this morning. Obviously, our format will also include time for the audience to ask your questions and offer your comments. So let's begin with Andy Kohut. Andy? 4 MR. KOHUT: I'm happy to be here to tell you about the Pew Audience Survey, a survey that we do once every two years. It's going to be a little bit of tell-and- show. I'm going to tell you about the major findings, at least from my point of view, and then show you just a few pictures to bring home the conclusions. As Ron mentioned, this is our eighth survey on a series that goes back to 1990. Over that time, we've been chronicling the fragmentation of American news audiences in response to new technologies, but also in response to the sagging interest of younger generations of Americans in hard news. Our headline today isn't about technology, nor is it about how younger people aren't interested in hard news; it's about the way news audiences are increasingly becoming politicized. We see this in their cable and news preferences and we see this in the distinctions they make and the credibility judgments that they give to various news organizations. While news habits have been relatively stable in recent years--and the reference in this survey is mostly between the survey we conducted in 2004 and the surveys we've conducted in 2002 and 2000--we do see the cable news audience continues to grow modestly. In particular, Fox News has made significant gains in audience over this period, thanks to the increasing viewership of Republicans and conservatives. Fully 52 percent of the Fox News audience, the people who say that they're regular viewers of Fox News Channel, are political conservatives. That compares to only 40 percent who said that back in the year 2000. At the same time, CNN has a more Democratic-leaning audience than in the past. 5 The same pattern of politicalization is found in evaluations of media credibility. Republicans have become more distrustful of virtually all news organizations over the past four years, and especially over the past two years, while Democratic evaluations of the news media have mostly been unchanged. Half as many Republicans as Democrats give the highest believability rating to a variety of well-known news organizations, including all three broadcast networks, NPR and The NewsHour, the New York Times, and each of the major news magazines. CNN's once-dominant credibility rating have slumped in recent years, mostly among Republicans and independents, and Fox News believability ratings have remained steady, but are markedly lower among Democrats and independents. Nonetheless, more people continue to say they believe all or most of what they hear on CNN than say that about Fox News. Besides the politicalizing trend, there are a number of other things that I want to mention to you. First, a sizable number of Americans continue to seek out in- depth news. And while TV news remains dominant, as many as 4 in 10 Americans say they get more out of the news by hearing about it or reading the news than from video. This not only affects their readership of newspapers and magazines, but, also profoundly, it affects their choices of electronic news sources. The durability of these serious news consumers is reflected in the steady numbers of Americans who are regular consumers of news from NPR, The NewsHour, C-SPAN, and magazines like The New Yorker and the Atlantic. These audiences have not increased in recent years--and they're small--but they have not suffered the long-term declines experienced by newspapers and broadcast news. 6 Our survey this year found Americans are spending somewhat more time with the news than they have in the past. Our interview begins by asking people what they did in the day prior to the interview. We found more minutes devoted this year by our average respondent to dealing with the news--listening to the news or following the news, especially television news. This probably reflects continuing high interest in the war in Iraq. Interest in Iraq has also led to a sharp rise in the number of Americans who say they closely follow international news most of the time, not just when important news developments are breaking. More than 52 percent in this survey said that that was the case; that's up from 37 percent in 2002 and a comparable number in previous surveys. Despite this finding, there's little indication in other questions in the survey that the core audience for international news is deeper or more diverse. It continues to be well-educated, middle-aged men and not much beyond that. The online audience continues to grow. Twenty-nine percent of the people that we interviewed said they get news online three or more times a week; 25 percent say they regularly get news from an ISP--network or local television Web site, newspaper Web site, or an online magazine. That's getting reasonably close to the 36 percent who regularly watch one of the three network evening news broadcasts. Online audiences are also becoming more diverse. While they continue to be better educated and mostly younger people, the age gap is different than it was in the past. A few years ago, the age gap was under-30/over-30. Now the age gap is 7 under-50/over-50. And the survey finds a quarter of African Americans regularly getting their news online, up from 15 percent just two years ago. So, those are the major findings in this report. It's a very big survey. There's a lot of material there, but--the results that I put the most emphasis on. Let me show you some of the pictures that support this notion, and then we'll get on with the discussion. First, we see cable competition over the past six years. Fox is now at 25, CNN is at 22, and MSNBC is at 11. The slope of most of these lines, except for Fox, is down, and Fox is up. Fox's gain reflects the fact that it has a strong Republican base. This is the trend in the percentage of Republicans who say they regularly watch Fox News--you can see it climb from 18 percent to 35 percent--and among Democrats, it's a little bit up, but mostly flat. And Republicans are falling away from CNN. At one point, if I'm reading this chart right from this angle, close to 38 percent -- 35 percent of Republicans said that they were viewers -- now down to 19 percent, and the Democratic numbers are higher, certainly more stable. This partisan patterning doesn't only relate to Fox, it also relates to a variety of news sources. As you can see, in the second block of numbers, there's a big gap between the percentage of Republicans and Democrats who say they regularly watch CBS Evening News or ABC evening news--the gap is less for NBC. There's a big gap on NPR; 19 percent of Democrats say they regularly listen, and among Republicans it's 13 percent. And then O'Reilly and Limbaugh, obviously, get much more Republican audiences, almost exclusively Republican audiences. 8 Looking at the same data in terms of the news sources a different way, 44 percent of CNN's audience are self-described Democrats; 25 percent Republicans.