The Politics of News Media Audiences

[alp227]

FAIR posted a blog today about a recent Pew Research Center study about which ideological audience follows certain sources (magazines, TV, websites). (Click on the FAIR link for links that were repressed here.)

First, when looking at generic media categories, you see that many of them are more attractive to the right than to the left: When asked which outlets they used regularly, conservative Republicans were more likely than liberal Democrats to name local TV (50 percent vs. 40 percent), daily newspapers (47/40) and community papers (37/26). Others were relied on more or less as much by both political poles: network evening news (23/24), Sunday morning shows (11/13) and news blogs (12/13). The categories that were less attractive to the conservative Republicans than to liberal Democrats were morning shows (15/21) and news magazines (7/16).

There is a widespread public perception--one that FAIR has offered much evidence to debunk over the years--that there's a pervasive liberal bias in U.S. news media. When asked about journalistic bias by the Pew survey, 43 percent said they saw mostly liberal bias, with only 23 seeing mainly conservative slant. If newspapers and TV news were biased against the right, though, one would expect that the left would find them to be more attractive--yet that doesn't seem to be the case. (Bear in mind that the percentages cited are of the groups themselves--it doesn't matter how big a fraction of the general public each subset represents.) Are right-wingers more willing to accept news whose point of view they disagree with? That's not what they tell Pew: 41 percent of conservative Republicans said they prefer to get news from sources that share their political point of view, vs. 33 percent of liberal Democrats.

So much for "narrow-minded leftist pinhead academics" conservatives enjoy teasing. Appears that liberals are slightly more open-minded regarding "getting my own POV from the news" than are conservatives.

Once again, that "fair and balanced" Fox News Channel takes the cake for the most one-sided audience:

Turning to specific news outlets, the one that's most attractive to either wing is, unsurprisingly, Fox News--watched regularly by 48 percent of conservative Republicans and only 7 percent of liberal Democrats. Though the audiences of its rivals, CNN and MSNBC, did skew left (10/26 and 5/18, respectively), neither was as attractive to the left as Fox was to the right, and the ratios were not as lopsided: Fox is watched by one side seven times more than the other, vs. three times as much for CNN and four times as much for MSNBC. C-SPAN had a less polarized audience (2/3).

And the audience share of the opinion shows is much more polarised for Fox News programs than MSNBC. And what...1% of liberal Democrats regularly watch O'Reilly, and 1% of conservative Republicans watch Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews?!?

Looking at individual cable shows, the survey found a handful of Fox shows that strongly appealed to conservative Republicans and were virtually ignored by liberal Democrats: The O'Reilly Factor (27 percent vs. 1 percent), Hannity (20/0) and Glenn Beck (19/0). MSNBC's roster had shows that were correspondingly ignored by conservative Republicans, but were not nearly so attractive to liberal Democrats: Hardball (1/7), Maddow (1/7) and Countdown (0/7). The satirical shows of Comedy Central (Daily Show, 3/14; Colbert Report, 2/11) came closer to the appeal of the Fox programs for liberal Democrats, but their audiences were somewhat less politically homogeneous.

On radio:

Two radio outlets were included in Pew's survey: the Rush Limbaugh Show and NPR. Limbaugh's program had political demographics similar to Fox's programs (17/1), whereas NPR looked more like CNN (6/23).

And newspapers:

Finally, among national newspapers, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today had more appeal to the right (both 7/3), whereas the New York Times had much more appeal for the left (1/13).

Maybe because of USA Today's largely uncritical front-page profiles of the Tea Party?

[Bitwit1234]

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