MSNBC – News Station?
Many people get
nearly all of their news from cable television news stations, namely CNN, Fox
News, and MSNBC. From these stations
people also get a lot of commentary, much of it blind, biased opinion.
Regardless of
wisecracks from liberal pundits, I remember hearing about a content analysis
during the 2008 Presidential campaign season that measured the types of stories
and mentions of the major candidates which revealed, much like their claim,
that Fox News was, in fact, the most balanced.
I heard the results
of another study about a year and a half ago, of 20 major news outlets –
television stations and newspapers – that found that 18 bent to the Left and
only two – Fox News and the Washington Times – leaned conservative.
(Note: These are older studies which
I heard reported on the radio. I’m
afraid I can’t reference which groups produced them, but I imagine anyone
interested enough could track them down to be sure I'm remembering them correctly.)
However, just
recently, the Pew Research Center released its “State of the News Media 2013”
study. It found that among the three
major networks, CNN fared the best in factual versus commentary programming,
with a 54% to 46% spread in favor of factual reporting. Fox News was a little behind, scoring 45%
factual to 55% commentary.
The most interesting
finding was that MSNBC almost couldn’t be characterized as a news channel,
providing only 15% factual reporting, versus 85% commentary. Of course, MSNBC – which provided three to
four times less factual reporting than its rivals – was the only network to
pick up viewership, placing it solidly second behind Fox, whose viewership
remained flat. CNN’s viewership fared
the worst, falling 4% in prime time.
The results of all
this fits with the eye test, but it does beg the question, when it comes to
politics, is the American citizen becoming less informed? Our Founding Fathers said that this country
was built for a religious and informed citizenry. As we seem to become less of both, one
wonders what the future will bring.
