There was a debate on Initiative 1125 before the Seattle Times editorial board yesterday.

You can watch it here.

Whaddya think?

From two very reputable polling organizations, Gallup and Pew.

Gallup found that the public has low, but stable, opinions of our "mainstream" news organizations.

The majority of Americans still do not have confidence in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly.  The 44% of Americans who have a great deal or fair amount of trust and the 55% who have little or no trust remain among the most negative views Gallup has measured.

Gallup has found negative opinions about our news organizations every year since 1997, except for 2004.  And even in that poll, the public was barely positive.

The perceptions of bias are even more consistent.

The majority of Americans (60%) also continue to perceive bias, with 47% saying the media are too liberal and 13% saying they are too conservative, on par with what Gallup found last year.  The percentage of Americans who say the media are "just about right" edged up to 36% this year but remains in the range Gallup has found historically.

Unlike Gallup, Pew found changes in their annual poll, changes for the worse.  (The two organizations asked entirely different sets of questions, so there may not be a conflict in the results.)

Negative opinions about the performance of news organizations now equal or surpass all-time highs on nine of 12 core measures the Pew Research Center has been tracking since 1985.  However, these bleak findings are put into some perspective by the fact that news organizations are more trusted sources of information than are many other institutions, including government and business.

In other words, we really dislike our news organizations, but we dislike other organizations even more.

Now for those twelve measures.  In seven of them, negative opinions outweighed positive opinions.  Americans believe that news organizations are often influenced by the powerful (80-15), tend to favor one side (77-16), try to cover up mistakes (72-18), often have inaccurate stories (66-25), are politically biased (63-25), don't care about the people they report on (63-26), and are immoral (42-38).  All of these were record highs for negative opinions, except for caring about the people they report on.

In one, hurt democracy, Americans were split with 42 percent agreeing and 42 percent disagreeing.

Americans still give news organizations positive marks on three measures, being professional (57-32), caring about the quality of their work (62-31), and keeping leaders doing their jobs (58-25).

Unlike Gallup, Pew found recent changes among Democrats.  For example:

Three-quarters of Republicans (76%) say news organizations are politically biased, a view shared by 54% of Democrats.  In 2007, 70% of Republicans but only 39% of Democrats said the press was politically biased.  Views on this question among independents have changed little (63% now, 61% in 2007).

(I have some speculations about this shift that I will save for another post.)

I'll be using this post as a basis for others, so I'll end here with this observation:  News organizations may worry about these findings privately, but I see little evidence that they do — and almost no evidence that they intend to do anything to change those negative opinions.  Even though those negative opinions must be costing them serious amounts of money.

Cross posted at Jim Miller on Politics.

I moved the blog to a new hosting service today. Most everything seems to be working. One glitch is that the longer entries now show up in their entirety on the main page, (the feature that posts only the short excerpts on the main page with the "read the rest" link is broken for some reason).

Let me know whether everything else works, or not.

And I'll aim to start posting some real content of my own this week as well.

All politics is local -- last year's Initiative 1053 (2/3 for tax increases, majority legislative approval for fee increases) passed statewide with 64% support, but here's the breakdown by legislative district including the state politicians in each district.

Governor Gregoire is announcing today that a 30 day special session will be held in Olympia shortly after the general election and November's revenue forecast. Thanks to 64% of voters, I-1053 will protect us, ensuring that tax increases are an absolute last resort. That's what the people want as illustrated by the fact that they've voted for these policies four times (this November's vote on Initiative 1125 is our 5th opportunity).

Voters sent a very clear message last November and will hopefully sent it again this November: taking more of the people's money shouldn't be easy especially during these tough economic times. Taxpayers work hard for their money and it oughta be tough for the government to take it away from us.

Gregoire and the Democrats are trying to clear the decks for taking more of the people's money by suing the citizens over I-1053, but three unanimous rulings from the state supreme court rejecting these same kinds of challenges should stop them from being optimistic about their chances. Regardless, the people's support for making it tougher to take more of the people's money remains. Olympia needs to respect the voters ballot box decisions.