On Television: FOX News, CNN and MSNBC

The Pew Research Center investigated the way society and media see liberalism and conservatism in the book Trends 2005. In chapter three, More Voices, Less Credibility, we see reference to a change in media that coincides with the public’s views. With so many choices available comes the ability to find a news source that will reinforce individual belief systems. The twenty-four-hour news channels, such as Fox News and CNN, are not only serving news that a particular audience finds appealing, they are doing so on a larger scale than the broadcast news of earlier generations. The audiences of these stations tend to lean one way or the other politically; a majority of those viewing Fox News are abundantly self-identified conservatives while those tuning in to CNN are often more liberal. Local daily papers, with the exception of their opinion pages, and broadcast news are less likely to make obvious leans to the left or right in most cases because their reach is much smaller, causing them to stay somewhere in the middle and cater to a broader audience. In the study done by Pew, thirty-five percent of self-proclaimed Republicans watch Fox News and twenty-eight percent of self-reported Democrats view CNN regularly (Trends; 2005).
While we as a society have more choices for news sources, as a group we tend to have less a news habit than we had just ten years before. Although news seeking is less of a priority for most Americans, it is not linked to the complaint of bias or inaccurate reporting. In contrast, most people claim they are not watching or reading much news because of a lack of time and increased responsibilities. Another reason people are not seeking news is their feelings of being uninformed about what is going on in the world. Those who are less educated are less likely to seek information, according to Pew Research. As choices in where we get our news have increased, choices in what messages those sources relay are fewer than ever, with many of the news outlets being owned by conglomerates (Trends; 2005).
This in part is related to the merging of news organizations, creating conglomerates. Fewer organizations than before are in charge of the majority of news we receive as a society. This creates fewer choices in messages. We also find there is a link in reduced media consumption to the increased media output. Society is becoming overwhelmed by media with the increase of messages everywhere citizens look. Technology has put news at the fingertips of society with increased speed (Campbell; 2007). Most people, though, simply relate the decrease in their media consumption to a lack of time.
In the book The Future of the Mass Audience, several arguments are made about the mass media audience, one of which is “the targeting argument.” This argument states that media are using data gathered from mailing lists and the like to format their messages and content to a particular segment of society. Another argument made is “the scope argument,” which says that with the increasing reach of media, local news has less of an effect or place in media consumption. The book also talks about the pluralism of today’s society. The book relates the concern that as media become more centralized to particular sections of society, as a group will become more fragmented. With magazines becoming more specialized and the same being true of cable networks, our society is in larger numbers becoming more segregated in its ideology (Neuman; 1991). The arguments made are backed by the sociological theory that we are a homogenized society.
Recent researchers have been interested in the exposure to biased or unbalanced news. At the top of the list are cable news channels like Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC. An article published in the American Journalism Review draws attention to the audiences of cable news channels. According to the report, Fox News, a conservative-leaning network, draws a larger audience than does its rival CNN, a more moderate network. The report makes claims about the networks’ ideologies by comparing anchors and presentation style. It assumes that it is in fact these styles that attract the audience that tends to tune in to each station (Farhi; 2003).
The report refers to a study conducted by ADT Research in 2002. In this study of the three cable news networks, formats were described in the following way: The research found CNN objectives were primarily in news gathering, paying more attention to top stories with less opinion from its anchors. It describes Fox News as touching quickly on more stories and inserting the opinion of anchors into the stories on a regular basis. MSNBC received less attention by the research but was said to be more liberal than CNN and depicted news in a style similar to that of Fox News. The study compared shows aired on the networks, interview styles of their anchors, as well as the flow of news shows in making these determinations (http://www.pbs.org).