CHAPTER 5 PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE VERSUS MEDIA-SHAPED OPINIONS Polls that ask individuals about both their own situations and about the rest of the nation or world at large provide evidence that people receive from the press and television an overly negative impression of the world around them. A striking and consistent discrepancy exists between the poll results of people's assessments of what they know personally and what they think is happening "out there". People have much more favorable views of what they know first hand in their own lives than what they think is the situation elsewhere. As Lipset and Schneider put it, "Americans repeatedly express optimism and confidence about their own lives and their personal futures, even while decrying the terrible mess the country is in" (1987, p. 8). And since the country is (from one point of view) the composite of its citizen's lives, these data evidence show a systematic negative bias in people's assessments of the situation at large. That is, if there were no bias and people were to judge accurately about other people's situations, the average of people's judgments about their own situations would equal the average judgment about the country as a whole. But the two are not equal, showing a downward bias in the abstract "out there" assessment. The main source of information about most other people's situations and lives is the media. Therefore, it is reasonable to assert that the media are responsible for this negative bias in people's assessments about the situation of the country at large. Figure 5-1 shows people's assessments of their own lives, and of the situation of the country, as of various dates. More positive judgments for people's own lives is the general rule. Figure 5-1 [Ult Res was Lipset Schneider Table 5-1] Figure 5-1 also shows that this bias has become more pronounced with time. Lipset and Schneider comment on this phenomenon as follows: " A striking characteristic of the decline of confidence is that it is almost entirely related to events beyond people's own personal experience: conflicts, scandals, protests, and failures that affect their own lives indirectly, if at all" (p. 8). But why should be there a decline with respect to public events but not to private events? Perhaps the explanation is that the press has come to pay more attention over the years to "conflicts, scandals..." and the like. And perhaps this is because with every passing year there is less of other news - fewer wars in which the U.S. is engaged, fewer catastrophic natural disasters because of better productions, fewer disease epidemics, fewer catastrophic fires, and fewer other events that threaten life and limb and which have been major worries throughout human history. (The best measure of this is the rising level of life expectancy in the U.S. and in the world.) Other evidence comes from the comparison of the present to a few years earlier. Individuals see the present as better than the past in their own lives, which is an accurate assessment on average because health and the standard of living have improved over time; people can know this from first-hand evidence, and they imagine that the future will be better for them than the present. But with respect to the country as a whole, and the economy, about which they cannot know first hand, they regard the past as better than the present - the usual "good old days" nostalgia. This discrepancy was shown typically in a 1991 poll about whether people felt "Not as well off" as three years earlier. "You yourself are" not as well off received 33 percent of responses, but "Most Americans" received 48 percent of the responses, compared to "Better off" and "In about the same shape" (ABC News/Washington Post, October 18-21 and December 11-15, 1991, in The American Enterprise, Jan-Feb 1992, p. 99). Again, the only likely source of this inconsistent misjudgment is the media. People in a wide range of countries also imagine that their children will have a harder time in life than they themselves have had and had now (See Figure 00 from Wash Post). Figures 00 [from Ult Res] The same effect appears when the subject is the environment. When asked about the environmental conditions in their own area - whose conditions they know personally - as well as conditions in the country as a whole, respondents rate the local environment more highly than the environment in the country as a whole, and indicate a much lower degree of worry about it. (See Figure 5- 2). When asked before Earth Day 1990 whether pollution is "a serious problem that's getting worse" for "the country as a whole", 84 percent said "serious", but with respect to "the area where you live", only 42 percent said "serious."<1> As the Compendium of American Opinion put it, "Americans are primarily concerned about the environment in the abstract...most Americans are not worried about environmental problems where they live...most Americans do not feel personally affected by environmental problems."<2> The average person feels that the grass is greener on his or her own side of the street - or more precisely, that the grass is browner on the other person's side of the street which the comparer has never even seen. Again, this cuts the logical ground out from under the abstract aggregate judgments, because they are not consistent with the sum of the individual judgments. Figure 5-2 The same phenomenon appears with respect to immigration. Even though over the decades all polls have shown that Americans do not favor more immigration when asked in the abstract, Americans have positive feelings toward the immigrants in their own areas, and towards the immigrants they know personally. The comparison between the results of the two inquiries can be seen clearly in a 1978 poll about Vietnamese immigrants. When asked, "Thinking now about the Indochinese refugees, the so-called `boat people'; would you favor or oppose the United States relaxing its immigration policies so that many of these people could come to live in the United States?", 32% were in favor, 57% were opposed, with 11% no opinion. But when asked, "Would you, yourself, like to see some of these people come to live in this community or not?" 48% said "yes," 40% said "no," with 13% no opinion. There is an interesting split in thought here, with the greater voiced opposition apparently being based upon general belief formed by the mass media, and the greater voiced support coming from personal experience with immigrants (R. Simon, 1985, p. 42). Another example: According to a poll of black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American journalists, "Six in 10 minority journalists said the media do a poor or very poor job of covering their racial or ethnic group - but an equal proportion rated their own news organization's reporting as fair to very good" (The Washington Post, July 30, 1994, A3). The evidence showing similar differences in attitudes toward one's own Congressional representatives and attitudes toward representatives as a whole may or may not be relevant; people may not have any more evidence to go on about their own representatives than about others. (ibid). Corroborating evidence: people are more likely to have a rosy view of "the good old days" with respect to the overall society, with which they do not have first-hand experience, than of earlier times in their own lives. They have personally experienced the secular improvements in health, standard of living, and the like, and hence they accurately report improvement. The fact that they have a different view of that which they do not know, and a less positive view of the present compared to the past, can only be attributed to their sources of second-hand information (or supposed information). This phenomenon will be analyzed further in Chapter 00. The power of the media to produce negative judgments about abstractions about which the public cannot possibly have an informed judgment is shown by polls about "the most important problem facing the country today". In 1987, 1988, 1989, and 1990, the "budget deficit" received either the highest or the second-highest percentage of votes (CBS News/New York Times and Gallup polls in The American Enterprise, Jan/Feb 1992, p. 101). The national budget balance is an extraordinarily complex issue about which there is much controversy even among economists (who tended to be less concerned about this matter than non- economists, it seemed). Yet strong public judgment was elicited by the media reports. In a 1996 poll, 70 percent of the respondents said that the federal budget was "larger" as "compared to five years ago" when in fact it was less than half in absolute terms and much less than half in percentage terms (Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard University poll, Washington Post, October 13, 1996, pp. A1,38). The front-page headline was "A Nation That Poor-Mouths Its Good Times". Much the same is true of the aggregate unemployment rate (estimated by the public at four times its actual rate) and the rate of inflation. It is most welcome that there is mention of the fact that the times are good, even if the emphasis is on "poor-mouthing" the facts. But the news story never even hints that the only basis for any attitudes about the deficit is news stories; no one ever meets a federal deficit first hand. Way back sociologist Richard LaPiere showed the enormous inconsistency between what people say in the abstract and their own behavior. For two years starting in 1930, he and a young Chinese couple criss-crossed the U. S. together, and among 251 events of eating and staying in motels, they only encountered racial discrimination once. But when those very same establishments, plus another comparable sample, were asked in a mail survey "Will you accept members of the Chinese race as guests in your establishment?", the vast majority said that they would not (Plous, 1993, p. 59). CONCLUSION In surveys, there is a consistent discrepancy between the public's beliefs about the environments that they know first hand, and those they only know second-hand. Poll respondents view the situation they know at first hand more positively than the situation at large. The only likely explanation is that newspapers and television - the main source of notions about matters which people do not experience directly - are systematically misleading the public, even if unintentionally. There is a vicious circle here: 1) The media carry stories about environmental scares. 2) People therefore become frightened. 3) Polls then show people to be worried. 4) The worry then is cited as support for policies to initiate actions about the supposed scares. 5) These policies raise the level of public concern further. The media proudly say "We do not create the `news'. We are merely messengers who deliver it."<3> These data show that the opposite is true in this case. ENDNOTES **ENDNOTES** <1>: CBS News Poll, 4/16/90. <2>: Gilbert, ?, pp. 121-122. <3>: Richard Harwood, ombudsman, The Washington Post, May 31, 1992, C6. page 1 /mediabk opnslf5m/October 31, 1996