Gladstone explain how journalism is a difficult profession because of how journalists need to create a piece that is both what the audience wants to hear and somewhere along the lines of correct and true.
The Diagram on page 37 shows the drastic decrease in trust of the media, showing that by 2005 less than 50% of people had trust that the media they were being exposed to was true. Gladstone later explains that the public does have a bit of a misinterpritation of what a journalist is doing.
Gladstone explains how journalism is an important part of our democracy and is the only public service institution that can question political figures on a regular basis. The balance of reporting accurately and reporting what the public wants to hear is a common issue discussed by Gladstone. How I interpreted this was that the balance would be in what questions a journalist will ask to get specific information for a viewer. Some will leave the questions to lead to broad answers for a wide range of interpretations of the audience.
In todays world most sources of information are online and lead to many other sources with just a simple click. In my day to day I encounter a few different online news cites that use qualitative research with minimal quantitative research. Qualitative research has always been the most common in the news sources I see but after some thinking quantitative has more of a convincing power to me because of the actual data collected give me assurance on its accuracy.