IP Democracy: Internet Ranks Fourth as News Source?

The Radio and Television News Director Foundation(RTNDF) issued survey results yesterday that show television continues to dominate traditional and new media as a source of news. Of the 1,016 people surveyed, 65.5% named local television news as one of their top three sources of news, compared with 28.4% who cited newspapers and 28.3% who named national network news.

The surprising (to me) finding is that Internet was one of the top three choices for only 11.2% of those surveyed. This I couldn’t quite believe, so I scoped out in more detail the survey’s methods and detailed statistical results. The study, funded by the Ford Foundation and conducted by researchers at Ball State University, is, after all, conducted under the auspices of local TV news directors.

The more detailed results show that even young people (18 to 35) don’t pick the Internet as one of their top three choices for news — only 13.9% of the people surveyed in this demographic category said that the Internet is one of the top three sources of news. How can this be? It seems so counter-intuitive and certainly feels wrong for most of us who are online denizens.

I scoped out the survey methodology and it seems pristine with one niggling problem. The researchers relied on random sample dialing to residential telephone numbers, a fact that skew the results away from young people and early technology adopters, many of whom rely strictly on their mobile phones for voice service. (The researchers, however, oversampled for the young demographic, perhaps to take this into account.)

No, the answer lies in what kind of Internet subscription the respondents’ had, a background demographic question that did not appear in the survey queries. If the researchers had cut the data according to type of Internet subscription — dial-up versus broadband — the data might have yielded more interesting findings.

As this Pew Internet and American Life Project survey demonstrated, for homes with broadband connections, the Internet is actually second only to local news as a source of news. The Pew study, released in March, showed that 46% of young (18 to 36) respondents with broadband connections cite the Internet as a source of news, second only to local TV stations, which 51% cited as a source of news.

However, as is true with the RTNDF survey, older respondents and homes with dial-up rank the Internet fourth as a source of news. The implications, of course, are that as broadband penetration continues to increase, and as the younger demographic becomes the older demographic, the Internet will increasingly be the second-ranked source of news (and eclipse local broadcast stations?) no matter how you cut the data.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on October 5, 2006 9:37 AM to IP Democracy