Lack of confidence in U.S. media, part X

I'm talking in class today about First Amendment freedoms and protections for the press - and how chimerical they can be. The trouble is the rapidly declining levels of public confidence in the U.S. mainstream media - something I've talked about previously in this blog (see, e.g., this entry, "The public who care less and less about press freedom", from April 13). I noted research by the Pew Research Center's Trends 2005 report, the National Opinion Research Center, and USA Today. (See here for a U.S. News take on the Pew report, by Jay Tolsen; and Nicholas Kristoff covered the issue for the New York Times - see my blog entry for a review on that piece.

Anyway, it's worth summing up some serious statistics and points:

• 1. 45 percent of Americans believe little or nothing in their daily newspapers, up from 16 percent two decades ago.
  Pew Research Center's "Trends 2005" report (available online).
  
• 2.Between 1973 and 2002, confidence in the press has fallen sharply, from 85% to under 60% - and the press is now almost at the bottom amongst public institutions (only beaten by the legal system).
  National Opinion Research Center survey, 2004
  
• 3. A 2004 survey of 112,000 American high school students showed:
  - 32% of them believe that there is too much freedom of the press
  - Only 10% believe that there is not enough.
  - 36% would prefer that the media be subject to government control
  USA Today survey
  

Some comments and insights:

• "The public sees the [mass] media as self-centered and self-promoting."
  Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.
  
• "I think commercial factors are the overriding factor shaping the collapse of professional journalism.”
  Robert McChesney, professor of communication, University of Illinois
  
• "Media companies are more concentrated than at any time over the past 40 years, thanks to a continual loosening of ownership rules by Washington."
  Ted Turner, CNN founder
  
• "As people move online, the notion of news consumers is giving way to something called 'prosumers,' in which citizens simultaneously function as consumers, editors, and producers of a new kind of news in which journalistic accounts are but one element."
  Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, writing in The State of the News Media 2004
  (Above comments all from U.S. News)
  
• Nobody among the public seems to care much about Matt Cooper and Judith Miller. (And, as CNN reported last week "The full federal appeals court in Washington Tuesday rejected a request from two journalists facing possible jail sentences who had asked the court to reconsider a decision by a three-judge panel. . . . Cooper and Miller could face up to 18 months in jail for failing to reveal their confidential sources to a federal grand jury.")

It all seems quite discouraging, doesn't it?