Once you’ve given up trying to defend the idea that Fox News‘ “Fair and Balanced” slogan can be understood as anything other than irony, the fallback position is generally that everyone else is just as biased. Or as the headline over John Harwood’s piece in the New York Times (11/2/09) puts it, “If Fox Is Partisan, It Is Not Alone.”
To back up this assertion, Harwood–who’s the chief Washington correspondent for CNBC, and host of the New York Times Special Edition on MSNBC–relies on surveys by Scarborough Research that asked about the partisan identification of the audiences of cable channels. These surveys, Harwood asserts, reveal the “partisan fragmentation” of TV news audiences: If Fox viewers are 51 percent Republican and 31 percent Democrat (in 2004-05), so what–CNN viewers are 50 percent Democrat and only 29 percent Republican, and MSNBC‘s are 54/27 Democratic/Republican (in 2008-09; for some reason, Harwood doesn’t provide the most recent data for Fox‘s audience).
A mirror image, right? Well, maybe a funhouse mirror. What Harwood crucially neglects to mention is that a lot more people in the U.S. public identify as Democrats than Republicans; if you average a large number of polls on party identification, as Pollster.com does, you come up with Democrats being about 35 percent of all adults and Republicans at 22 percent. You would expect a channel that was equally attractive to Democrats and Republicans, then, to have about 1.6 Democratic viewers for every Republican.
Now, CNN and MSNBC do attract a few more Democrats–about 1.8 to 1 and 2 to 1, respectively. But there’s no comparison to the slant of Fox‘s audience, which has only 0.6 Democrats for every Republican. Look at it this way: If each channel’s current audience were a hundred people, CNN would have to add two Republicans to achieve partisan parity; MSNBC would need to find five more Republicans. Fox News, on the other hand, would have to find 51 more Democrats; for every Republican now watching, there’s a “missing” Democrat.
In other words–Fox News is not the same kind of animal as either CNN or MSNBC, despite Harwood’s efforts to pretend that it is.
The real issue for me isn’t one of attraction – it’s how all these corpress outlets, with FOX being the worst offender (big “Duh” there), *repel* anyone who’s honestly trying to find out what the hell is really going on.
There is another factor: Imagine two networks, one partisan, one that is totally neutral. The partisan one will draw viewers who share their slant away from the neutral network, and drive those who don’t care for its slant to the neutral network, thus making it seem (by Harwood’s flawed measure) that the neutral network is a partisan mirror image. Although our media situation is more complex than this, I believe that this has something to do with the very slightly inflated number of Democrats watching MSNBC and CNN.
How dare you insist that a national news personality such as Mr. Harwood show facility with advanced high school mathematics such as ratios and fractions! Ô°litist!
Something is very wrong with your math in this article – you say …
“CNN and MSNBC do attract a few more Democrats–about 1.8 to 1 and 2 to 1, respectively. But there’s no comparison to the slant of Fox’s audience, which has only 0.6 Democrats for every Republican.”
— but note that 0.6 Democrats per Republican is the same as 1.7 Republicans per Democrat, so your numbers suggest the bias is about the same. Then you state …
“If each channel’s current audience were a hundred people, CNN would have to add two Republicans…MSNBC would need to find five more Republicans. … Fox News … would have to find 51 more Democrats”
check your math – your numbers actually suggest that, for every 100 viewers, CNN and MSNBC would have to add 29 and 34 Republicans, respectively, and Fox would have to add 25 Democrats – was this a typo?
I’m somewhat surprised to see this from an organization which has a history of quantifying the GUESTS on TV “news” shows. The reason FOX (and others) are partisan isn’t because of who WATCHES them, it’s because of what they BROADCAST. As far as I can tell, FOX has exactly one NEWS program on its entire schedule, that’s Shepherd Smith. MSNBC has a few more and CNN probably the most. ALL of them, of course, are “partisans” of the ruling class, as evidenced by, for example in the current context, the number of interviews (generally zero) of people advocating single-payer health care (in this, of course, they differ little from the print media).
The biggest difference in partisanship is that partisans like Maddow and Olbermann are RATIONAL partisans; the Hannitys and O’Reillys and Becks are simply loony-tunes partisans by any “fair and balanced” analysis. Beck in particular would be far better described by the adjective “imbalanced,” as in “mentally imbalanced.”
Another minor difference is that CNN (Dobbs) and MSNBC (Scarborough) maintain “balance” by having right-wing partisans to balance out their left-wing partisans; FOX can claim no such distinction as far as I know.
Eli, the data on viewers was the only evidence that the New York Times article offered–that’s why I’m taking issue with it. There is much better evidence about Fox’s partisanship, including the source studies we’ve done.
PA, you have to keep in mind that 1.6 to 1 is the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in the general public. So 1.8 Democrats to every Republican is close to the audience you would get by chance, whereas 1.7 Republicans to every Democrat is very far from a random selection.
ELI: AS FAR AS I CAN TELL FOX NEWS IS THE ONLY NETWORK WERE PEOPLE CAN GET THE NEWS REPORTED CORRECTLY. MSNBC, IS SO SLANTED IT MAKES ME SICK.
FOX NEWS, AS AL FRANKEN HAS SAID IS LOADED WITH” LIES AND THE LYING LIARS WHO TELL THEM”.
“Fairly Imbalanced” seems to be the consensus. “Fairness Doctrine”, reintroduced, would do a lot to take all that opinion back into balance. The Conservatives are paranoid about Obama and gang getting set to re-introduce the Doctrine that Reagan got rid of. The liberals meanwhile are too conservative to change much of anything. Paul
i played with the numbers and came up with this…that 35/22 ratio = 62.8/37.2 per 100..using your 1.8, 2 and .6 figures, cnn has a 65/35 split, msnbc has a 67/33 split while faux’s number are almost flipped: 62 republicans to 38 democrats. sure hope this looks about right, cause math is hard….
Fox news definetly has a viewpoint they are attempting to get across. Fox news also has the most balanced debates of the three channels described. CNN is definetly more down the middle than MSNBCrazy. I have watched the SAME stories on MSNBCrazy and fox and have gotten the same information, minus some key details on msnbc. Example; when Maddow was discussing the extensions of unemployment benefits and spoke of how the republicans dragged it out for 5 extra weeks in attempt to “add an unrelated ammendment to acorn”. Fox reported the same information but shed light onto why the republicans were adding that legislation; it is because acorn is going to be eligable for money once again when their temporary ban is up.
That is a simple example, and i will note more specifics as i notice them.
The FACT that MSNBCrazy is owned by GE shows their bias towards not reporting the truth about the natural warming of our planet. Their father company wouldn’t make very much money off of that.
The problem is with who started this bias arms race the liberal media NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC and the like, the majority of the American people not being left wing liberals didn’t like being fed lies so they went elsewhere, FOX being where they went left all the other networks
in the dust as ratings show.