The good news, no pun intended, is that millions of Americans are hitting the Internet for news they can't get from the mainstream press. The bad news: Almost half don't like what they're seeing, especially in terms of such graphic images as those related to the U.S.-Iraq war.
That's the take from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which has released a new study, "The Internet as a Unique News Source," which found that, while 72 percent of those American Netizens surveyed hit the Net to get their news of any kind, 49 percent of them "show discomfort with the nature of the war images" they see there, compared to 40 percent who showed no discomfort and four percent who said whether they saw the image displays as right or wrong depended on the circumstances and the specific images.
Non-Netizens, however, disapproved of the war images to a 58 percent extent, compared to 29 percent of non-Netizens who did not disapprove, said the study by Pew senior research fellow Deborah Fallows and director Lee Rainie.
The divide was sharper between men and women surveyed, Fallows and Rainie reported, with 53 percent of men surveyed approving of the war images online compared to only 29 percent of women. Over half (52 percent) of those surveyed who were 30 years old or younger approved of the images compared to 44 percent of those between 30-49 and 31 percent of those over 50.
The division between Democrats and Republicans wasn't as broad, however: Fallows and Rainie reported 52 percent of those surveyed who called themselves Democrats approved of the war images while only 42 percent of those calling themselves Republicans approved. Independents also generally approved of the more graphic images being posted online, with 53 percent of them saying so, the two researchers added.
Fallows and Rainie also said that once Netizens surveyed had seen the more graphic war images, they had mixed feelings about them in terms of whether deciding to see them was a good idea. Barely over half said it was a good decision, while 33 percent said they wished they hadn't and seven percent said they felt both ways – it was a good idea to see them, but they wish they hadn't.
The two researchers said younger Netizens were more tolerant of disturbing news on principle while older Netizens "are more comfortable in reality," while upscale Netizens were also more likely to tolerate disturbing news when seen in cyberspace than others.
