Seeing is Not Necessarily Believing

People trust television over what they read in print. Is that because they have the illusion of witnessing the event firsthand--as opposed to relying on someone else's description? And yet we know images can be manipulated just as much as words--and I'm not talking about faking here. Camera angles, music, production values and the like influence our perceptions as much as the adjectives, verbs and nouns used in traditional print media.

At first when I looked at this chart from the latest State of the News Media report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, I fixated on how much more believable consumers found television over print media (full disclosure: I used to work at TIME and am still a contributor for them). More people believed cable news over either magazines or newspapers. Ha, I thought. I know better.



Then I looked at the overall picture. The best any news outlet scored was 25% believability. That means at least 75% of viewers/readers say they don't believe all or most of what they see or hear on the news.

It reminded me of a time when I covered a large demonstration in midtown Manhattan and one of the writers back at TIME's headquarters told me that he knew it was a violent demonstration because he had seen it on television. I, however, who had been there for several hours, saw no sign of violence.

There was one point--when the TV news cameras showed up--that someone burned an effigy of a person. And that's what the writer had seen and why he concluded it was a violent demonstration. That two-minute piece of street theater was more real to him than my own eyewitness account.

What does this have to do with health? Just this: that health coverage is part of the larger environment of news coverage. I used to think health news was somewhat insulated from those larger forces but not anymore. I'll have more to say on that in future posts.

Source: The State of the News Media 2007 (Project for Excellence in Journalism, a program of the Pew Research Center), accessed March 14, 2007