The main purpose of this article is to provide insight on how United States adults feel about news outlets and their ability to relay quality, unbiased stories. The article reports different graphs (primarily bar graphs), with the main idea being that more than half of surveyed US adults do not feel confident in what news sources are delivering to the public. However, 75% of adults feel as if there is room for improvement and more than half of US adults surveyed say they are more confident in outlets if they correct their stories. Americans also indicated through the surveys that they want to see more background details become transparent, such as where the outlets get their money from and what they spend it on. More specifically, Americans indicated that they want to have a personal connection and pick news outlets that portray people who are like them.
This data is based off of survey results, which can have errors in them as people can lie on surveys if they choose to. This is also based off of a sample of 10,300 US adults, not the entire US population.
This data was published on Pew Research Center’s website, but the data was collected via surveys that were conducted over the span of a year. The data excludes those who did not respond to the surveys. This information is based off of a sample of 10,300 US adults (with one additional section surveying 13,200 adults) that we can use to make generalizations about our population. The sample data should be very close to the population’s data due to the fact that the sample was representative.
I think the process that the analysts went through is as follows:
I am sure that there are multiple other very tedious steps that are in between, but I think this is the general overview of what the researchers went through to produce this article.