HOW AMERICANS GET THEIR NEWS
By Allan R. Andrews, Editor,

Pacific Stars and Stripes, Tokyo, Japan.

First published December 31, 1995

Conventional wisdom in the media says 65 percent of Americans get their news from television while only 41 percent claim newspapers as their main source of news.

In fact, those figures come from a study done in 1985, and the statistics have been loudly advertised by the Television Information Office, which first commissioned such a study back in 1959.

It's enough to make a newspaper editor lose heart. I've heard many of my print colleagues comment with a note of surrender, ``We can't beat television.''

We can't beat television's immediacy, but I've always thought we were beating their pants off with content.

Surprising and encouraging, then, is the argument of two researchers for the Scripps-Howard News Service and the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio State University.

We newspaper folks have allowed ourselves to be hoodwinked by the visual medium's public relations ploys, imply Thomas Hargrove and Guido H. Stempel II.

A careful look at and analysis of the claims television makes to be the main source of news for 65 percent of America simply doesn't hold up, Hargrove and Stempel told those attending the summer convention in Washington of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (AEJMC).

``It is time for the newspaper industry to shout it from the housetops. Whether your interest is news or advertising, the newspaper is No. 1,'' the researchers write.

Bear with me as I climb to the housetop.

First of all, researchers have repeatedly discovered that polls taken to determine the main source of Americans' news and information are biased by the very question they ask.

A typical research question asks Americans where they get ``most of your news about what's going on in the world.''

However, researchers in Oregon and Ohio -- including Stempel -- discovered that when the word ``world'' is replaced by a regional or urban locality, newspapers come out far ahead of television in the polls.

According to Hargrove and Stempel, similar research in Michigan showed that when the question is raised about the source of state news, newspapers again outdistance television by a wide margin.

The two newspaper researchers have a particularly hard time swallowing the ABC-TV promotional blurb that asserts, ``More Americans get their news from ABC News than from any other source.''

Properly interpreted, Hargrove and Stempel argue, this simply means ABC's early evening newscast with Peter Jennings has a larger audience than CBS with Dan Rather or NBC with Tom Brokaw.

Yes, the researchers admit, ABC's estimated 11 or 12 million audience is larger also than the circulation of the nation's two largest selling newspapers, The Wall Street Journal with 1.9 million and USA Today with an estimated 1.5 million.

However, Hargrove and Stemple note, the combined audience of the three networks on any given night falls far short of the combined 59.8 million readers of daily newspapers in the United States.

Let me climb on the chimney to repeat that one: On any given day, far more people are reading daily newspapers than are watching evening newscasts.

In fact, Hargrove and Stempel go farther: ``More people read a newspaper on a given day than watch early evening local newscasts, early evening network newscasts or late evening local newscasts.''

Their research puts reading a daily newspaper at 42 percent, well ahead of watching an early local newscast at 31.8 percent, or watching an early network newscast at 24 percent or watching a late local newscast at 19.3 percent.

Aiming their research and comments at advertisers, Hargrove and Stempel further indicate that newspaper reading varies in direct proportion to income and that those whose annual income is higher than $60,000 are far more likely to read a newspaper than persons with annual income below $25,000.

``The advertiser who wants to reach the upscale audience should consider the newspaper the primary medium for doing so,'' the researchers write.

The researchers suggest similar correlations exist with education level and age. That is, newspapers attract an older, more educated audience.

(Such a finding raises interesting speculations: Does this finding explain what many claim is the ``dumbing down'' tendency of TV programming? Does this finding suggest that military officers and NCOs are much more likely to read a newspaper like Pacific Stars and Stripes than are the young GIs we think comprise our primary target audience?)

The conclusions reached by Hargrove and Stempel simply don't support the conventional wisdom that more Americans get their news from television.

In fact, they show clearly when averaged over a week that more Americans read a newspaper every day than watch any kind of televised newscast every day.

The researchers note that most surveys showing Americans get their news from television make no attempt to gauge the volume of news Americans are getting.

Hargrove and Stempel cleverly observe that most newscasts printed word-for-word would not fill a single page of a newspaper.

If one accepts the demonstration that TV newscasts provide minimal content, then newspapers clearly are the main source of news and information for most Americans.

Of course, I didn't have to shout this news to convince readers who have read this far, did I?

Allan R. Andrews can be contacted at allan.andrews@reporters.net