The Media vs. its Audience

Three-quarters of Americans feel that the country’s moral values have declined over the past few decades, and 68 percent say that both Hollywood and the news media are a large contributing factor, according to the Media Research Center (MRC).

“Even liberals feel that the media have a negative impact by more than 50 percent,” says Robert Knight of the MRC’s Culture and Media Institute.

Further analysis in the study was based on a contrast between “light television viewers,” Americans who average less than an hour of television viewing per night, and “heavy television viewers,” those who watch four or more hours of TV per night:

• The people who are heavy TV viewers believe the government is responsible for health care.

• About the same proportion think that the government is responsible for their retirement.

• 44% of light TV viewers think that abortion is wrong compared to just 27% of heavy TV viewers.

• 47% of light TV viewers attend religious services compared to 28% of heavy TV viewers.

Interestingly, Knight also pointed out the “seductive effect” of the media, showing that 58 percent of heavy television viewers are less likely to admit the media’s harmful influence on values, versus the 78 percent of light watchers.

In spite of this tendency, research shows that a large percentage of Americans in fact do have traditional lifestyles and hold to conservative beliefs, grossly misrepresented by the news and what is portrayed as normal in entertainment, MRC director L. Brent Bozell declares, “We are a nation that reveres religion, respect, and personal responsibility.” Bozell quoted the Bishop of Baltimore’s observation that more Americans attend religious services on Sunday than all the sporting events combined.

How do the media attempt to reconcile its relationship to its market? Oftentimes, the media attempts to define morality as “making clear just how unclear things are,” while capitalizing on the shades of gray, according to Dr. S. Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs. Self-expression is exceedingly praised, while repression or restraint should be avoided at all costs.

Dr. Lichter is a professor at George Mason University. Journalists, he observes, have largely come to believe that their job is no longer to merely report the facts, but relay the “truth behind the facts.” Americans have seen the many problems with the subjectivism and arrogance of this trend, and have resented “being told what to think”, as shown in MRC studies.

For example, film critic Michael Medved points out that wholesome producers of Christian entertainment have enjoyed steady success. This truth is perhaps unknown because these public figures “aren’t arrested as regularly,” he joked.

Decent entertainment is accessible to the public today, and moral messages are sometimes seen in mainstream media. Medved pointed out that a relationship between media and American values is not always one of causation. He summed up with his statement, “You must measure the differential correlation based upon not the quality of television, but the quantity of TV you watch.”

Mary Kapp is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a joint program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.