Politico reports that's the argument made by Princeton professor Markus Prior, who argues in a new
academic paper,
"The culprit turns out to be not Fox News, but ESPN,
HBO, and other early cable channels that lured moderates away from the news and
away from the polls."
Prior says that while cable news channels may be partisan,
very few people actually watch them, no more than about 10 to 15 percent of the
voting age population. By contrast, he says that in the 1960s and '70s, quote,
"even people with little interest in news and politics watched network
newscasts because they were glued to the set and there were no real alternatives
to news in many markets during the dinner hour."
The cable news channels needed a way to draw viewers from
the growing entertainment options, and therefore made news itself more
"entertaining" with partisanship and bombast.
Politico writes, "Talk to cable news hosts now and many
of them will tell you that they don't view other cable news hosts as the
competition. Their competition is CSI or Dancing With the Stars.
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