Author: Chris Urban
Published: February 18, 1999
Last Updated: March 02, 1999
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Why newspaper credibility has been dropping

A central component of the three-year-long Journalism Credibility Project was a comprehensive study of public attitudes about media credibility. The research was designed to probe deeply into the underlying causes of the disconnect between journalists and their audiences.

With special attention given to newspapers, this research identified six fundamental reasons why the public’s perception of media credibility is so low. The research that supports these findings had three major components:

• A national survey of 3,000 telephone interviews (23 minutes on average, and completed in April and May) stratified to provide a random, representative sample of not only the five major census regions of the U.S., but of the four county-size designations within each, with the complete database weighted against U.S. census statistics to be projectable to 197,344,000 U.S. adults.
• A series of 16 validation focus groups (completed in August) in which initial findings drawn from the quantitative survey were discussed and commented upon by groups of loyal, occasional and Sunday-only newspaper readers.
• A self-administered 12-page questionnaire (completed in May and June) by a random, stratified sample of 1,714 journalists working at U.S. newspapers with daily circulation above 5,000.