Interesting post from Kevin Drum:

That aside, Shafer raises two points. First, based on a pair of Pew surveys from 2004 and 2005, he argues that you can’t rely on polls showing that readers find daily newspapers less believable than they used to. After all, the very same polls that show declining believability also show remarkably high levels of favorable opinion toward daily newspapers. Similar dynamics are at work for both local and network TV news, with the favorability/believability gaps getting noticably wider and more puzzling after 2002 in all cases.

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Shafer also points out that press dissatisfaction is largely aimed at other people’s media — it turns out that opinions of their own local newspaper and their own local newscasts is pretty high. As with opinions about schools and congressmen, people mostly think it’s only everybody else’s failings that are ruining things for the rest of us. So perhaps we should take their criticisms with a grain of salt.

Read the rest, it’s interesting.