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Friday, August 12, 2022

Study: Cable News Bigger Polarizing Effect Than Social Media


A study  has found an imbalance between partisan TV news channels and the broader TV news environment. 

The Nieman Lab reports observations revealed that Americans are turning away from national TV news generally in substantial numbers — and crucially, this exodus is more from centrist news buckets than from left- or right-leaning ones. Within the remaining TV news audience, we found movement from broadcast news to cable news, trending toward MSNBC and Fox News.

The study measured just how politically siloed American news consumers really are across TV and the web. Averaging over the four years of our observations, we found that roughly 17% of Americans are politically polarized — 8.7% to the left and 8.4% to the right — based on their TV news consumption. That’s three to four times higher than the average percentage of Americans polarized by online news.

Trends reveal a counterintuitive finding: Although the overall TV news audience is shrinking, the partisan TV news audience is growing. This means that the audience as a whole is in the process of being “distilled” — remaining TV viewers are growing increasingly partisan, and the partisan proportion of TV news consumers is on the rise.

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