Americans are worried about bias in news but are generally more worried about the bias in your news than in their own. A new study from Gallup and the Knight Foundation found that six in seven Americans think there’s a fair amount of political bias in news coverage, and half said there’s a fair amount of bias in the news source they rely on most. But more
than two-thirds (69%) said they’re more concerned with the bias in the news that others consume than in their own (29%). The study, which came from more than 20,000 interviews collected between November 2019 and February 2020, also found that younger, more educated Americans are more worried about bias in others’ media consumption.
More on legendary journalist Bob Woodward’s decision to hang on to quotes of President Donald Trump downplaying the coronavirus from February. On CNN’s “Reliable Sources” on Sunday, former CDC detective Dr. Seema Yasmin argued that Woodward should have shared the quotes, saying, “If you have information that can save even one life, let alone close to 200,000 lives, then you have a journalistic duty, an ethical duty to share that information.” Host Brian Stelter said it was interesting that Woodward spoke with Trump so often, “almost trying to coach Trump like a leadership coach, and I wonder in the coming days if Woodward will say that was part of his rationale for what he was
doing.”
For Nieman Reports, Issac J. Bailey wrote that Woodward’s decision to hold the quotes until shortly before the publication of his new book, “Rage,” was unethical. Bailey said that we’ll never know if releasing them would have made an impact, “But we didn’t need a guarantee; we just needed a chance. Woodward could have provided it. It’s disturbing that he refused to.”
Woodward appeared on CBS’s “60 Minutes” Sunday night, where he talked with correspondent Scott Pelley about his last interview with Trump in August. Woodward said Trump told him that “nothing more could have been done” about the coronavirus. “Does he remember what he told me, back in February, about it’s more deadly than the flu?” Woodward said. “I mean it almost took my breath away, that there was such certainty, when he was absolutely wrong about the issue that defines the position of this country right now.”
|
