A new day for the ‘old media’?

Here’s today’s proposition: The quality of the media’s postelection analysis is inversely proportional to the clarity of the election’s result.

Is that true?

Probably. Well, maybe. Sometimes. Though actually, just this once -- as far as we know.

Still, it has a bracingly authoritative -- pseudo-empirical -- ring, which puts it on par with the several specious conclusions that continue to be drawn from George W. Bush’s decisive victories in both the popular vote and the race for electoral college votes.

Take, for example, the assertion by a wide variety of commentators that the president’s reelection was a defeat not just for Sen. John F. Kerry but also for the so-called mainstream media. According to this analysis, the campaign’s outcome represented a fundamental change in the way American voters chose to inform themselves, a shift away from centralized, elitist “old media” with its pretensions of dispassion and to a decentralized, democratized “new media,” forthright in its ideology.

As U.S. News & World Report’s Michael Barone put it this week in a column for the website www.townhall.com: “It was a bad election for Old Media.... The problem for Old Media is that it no longer has the kind of monopoly over political news that it enjoyed a quarter-century ago.... New Media has emerged: talk radio, Fox News Channel, the proliferation of Internet weblogs, which together make up the blogosphere. The left liberalism that is the political faith of practically all the personnel of Old Media is now being challenged by the various political faiths of New Media.”

Over at the Wall Street Journal, former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan -- who seems to have turned into a kind of rhapsodic survivalist with a taste for overripe Churchillian rhetoric -- discerned not only apocalypse but also heroism.

“I do think the biggest loser was the mainstream media,” she wrote. “Every time the big networks and big broadsheet national newspapers tried to pull off a bit of pro-liberal mischief ... the yeomen of the blogosphere and AM radio and the Internet took them down. It was to me a great historical development in the history of politics in America. It was Agincourt. It was the yeoman of King Harry taking down the French aristocracy with new technology and rough guts. God bless the pajama-clad yeomen of America. Some day, when America is hit again, and lines go down, and media are hard to get, these bloggers and site runners and independent Internetters of all sorts will find a way to file, and get their word out, and it will be part of the saving of our country.”

Maybe you have to be Ronald Reagan to read that with a straight face.

Casual students of history may recognize in these comments a smug mode of expression once common among those true believers who returned intoxicated from the Russian revolution to report that they had been to the future -- and it works.

In both cases, it’s a form of faith-based argument, and it has everything going for it, except the facts.

Sources of news

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press conducts one of the most comprehensive, nonpartisan quadrennial postelection surveys of voters. It asks respondents in its national sample to describe their media choices for campaign news. In response to questions from The Times, Pew’s director, Andrew Kohut, and associate director Michael A. Dimock provided an illuminating portrait of how voters informed themselves in 2004.

Respondents were asked to list their two primary sources of news about the campaign. The largest percentage, 76%, reported that television was one of their main sources of information, while 46% chose newspapers, 22% radio and 21% the Internet.

Break the television numbers down a little more finely and you find that 40% of voters preferred the cable networks while just 29% remained loyal to the networks. Fox News, which was preferred by slightly more than 1 in 5 voters, was the big winner, while CBS, which was picked by fewer than 1 in 10, was the major loser. As for the Internet number, that’s nearly double the figure from the last general election.

So far, all this would seem to support the new media triumphalists’ case. Look a little deeper, though, and a far more complex picture emerges.

For example, the percentage of voters who told Pew they relied on newspapers -- stereotypical old media -- as a primary source of campaign news actually increased by 7% over the last general election. Moreover, 16% of voters said they received their news from a combination of newspapers and cable -- 8% Fox and 7% CNN -- while 14% combined newspapers and one of the free broadcast networks.

What about Fox?

But what about that surge for Fox? In fact, both Fox and CNN were preferred over the networks by voters who relied on television. But another of the survey’s findings is interesting -- and relevant -- in this regard. More than half of all voters who ultimately cast their votes for Bush reported that they made up their minds a year in advance of election day. Here we enter the chicken-and-egg realm, but it seems possible that those voters chose Fox not because it was new media but because it was Republican media, where they could watch their choice reaffirmed on a daily basis.

Similarly, the significance of the Internet’s growth as a news source may not be precisely what the commentators make of it. While Pew did not poll on which sites Internet users relied upon, surveys that have done so in the past found that the heaviest traffic went to the online versions of established media organizations. CNN.com, for example, is regularly among the most-visited of all Internet sites. Keep that in mind and the figures for increased Internet use in this election begin to look like a quest simply for quicker access to traditional news outlets.

What about Noonan’s heroic blogger, Fox watcher, talk radio listener, this media revolution’s “new man”? Pew’s survey found that just 5% of the voters listed the combination of Fox and radio as their primary sources of campaign information. Only 3% made Fox and the Internet their primary choices. Actually, a higher percentage, 8%, preferred Fox and one of those nasty, conspiratorial old newspapers. By the way, the percentage of voters who say they regularly listen to talk radio has remained remarkably constant at 17% since the early 1990s.

But what about those pajama-clad bloggers, makers of a new Agincourt, “this happy few,” this band of brothers? Perhaps, they’re best left to commentators with Noonan’s flair for the epic. It is possible, however, to say something mundanely verifiable about their audience:

Inconveniently, if you use the postelection survey to construct a composite portrait of the voter who relied most heavily on the Internet for his campaign news, he was a young non-white male who was not religious, identified himself as a “liberal Democrat” and lived in a Western state -- that went for Kerry.

Inconvenient, but clarifying.