Opinion: Pew Distorts & Misleads to Torpedo Radio...Again

From Richard Harker, Radio Insights, Harker Research:

Pew calls it the Project for Excellence in Journalism, but it is really anything but.

Excellence doesn’t come from patching together a journalistic quilt of conflicting and contradictory research to support a biased and agenda-ridden narrative.

Excellence doesn’t come from selectively choosing data that supports a predetermined narrative while burying data that doesn’t.

Here’s how Pew sees the state of radio (emphasis added):

Most people still listen to news, talk and music for at least a little while every week, and they do most of this listening through traditional broadcast, or "terrestrial," radio. Yet this is where the profit and revenue are under the most pressure. Many stations have left the air and some owners of multiple stations have entered bankruptcy.

Terrestrial broadcast radio continues to serve the greatest number of overall listeners....This dominance, though, is based on an old advertiser-supported model that is showing serious cracks, especially if trends that are accelerating in other sectors hit radio in a way they haven't yet.

One has to gasp at the inaccuracies and misleading characterizations made in a mere two paragraphs.

This is simply an uninformed opinion based on nothing. It isn’t objective. It has nothing to do with excellence nor journalism nor even Pew’s own research.

The people behind this report appear convinced that radio is on the ropes, and they seem prepared to dismiss (or hide) any facts to the contrary. Radio’s imminent demise fits into a nice simple storyline, even if it is fictional.

A Pew study of news consumption last September produced this Inside Radio headline: Radio news hits lowest point in 20 years.

The story reproduced a Pew graph showing plunging radio news listenership. Unfortunately, Inside Radio appears to have relied on the Pew press release rather than studied the actual data.

The precise phrasing of a survey question is critically important. Small changes in a question can produce very different answers. For newspaper, the survey simply asked: Did you get a chance to read a daily newspaper yesterday, or not? The TV question was similar.

Simple and straightforward enough. Now take a look at the radio question:

About how much time, if any, did you spend listening to a radio news program or any news on the radio yesterday, or didn’t you happen to listen to the news on the radio yesterday?

Huh? What'd they say? Would you understand that question?

The radio question is long and confusing. By the end, it isn't clear what's being asked. It invites the participant to just say nope and be done with it.

Read more here.