Fox News Continues Dominance

[Dill]

(11-01-2023, 12:46 PM)pally Wrote: to be fair MSNBC is only marginally better from the far left.  As Fox and Trump grew crazily more popular they skewed more and more left with not as much success as Fox has had.  Granted Fox has been at partisan "reporting" and commentary far longer than MSNBC and does it with far less concern than MSNBC has had.  The polarization of the news audience, just like the electorate, and their desire to only hear their side is the biggest challenge for news organizations today.  CNN couldn't make up which direction to go so they still attempt, poorly, to staddle the middle ground.  That puts them far too liberal for the crowd that calls the Clinton News Network and far too pandering to MAGA for far too many on the left.  Any time any of the networks shows anything positive about the "other" side, the bases pounce with cries of sellout.

(11-01-2023, 04:39 PM)Millhouse Wrote: That definitely goes both ways though. Plenty of garbage propaganda comes from left wing news just like it does from the right.

Just my two cents here--I don't view MSNBC/CNN and Fox as left/right mirror images, with Fox being just a bit worse.
My ultimate test for news organizations is--what and how much does their audience know about the world around them that they need to know to be informed voters? 

Fox has actually groomed an audience of 50+million to accept an alternative reality*--the Russia investigation was a "hoax," Biden stole the election (so the present government is illegitimate), the FBI has been "weaponized" to go after Trump. Now it's non-stop IRAN IRAN IRAN in response to a complex ME conflict--so stop aiding Ukraine and aid Israel. There is no "garbage propaganda" with such effect on CNN/MSNBC. On Fox, there is no segment, no domestic/foreign policy problem, which does not place Biden front and center as "cause." Enough people buy this alternative reality to make it a real possibility that the worst president in history, who attempted a coup, could be re-elected and put in charge of foreign policy, as well as use the DOJ to go after enemies.  A Trump re-election, given the likely ramifications, is still the most serious threat to the nation right now. 

There is some bombast and excess on CNN/MSNBC, but 1) that's to be expected with commentary, and 2) they are still actual news organizations. I think Rachel Maddow (now on only once a week) had some of the best coverage of Trump's coup attempt. Fareed Zakaria's CNN show on foreign policy is also rather good, I think, especially his coverage of China and US relations. His knowledgeable guests frequently go through an entire segment without a mention of Biden or Trump. In the last week both networks have included balanced segments of credible Israeli and Palestinian guests to give readers some sense of the actual causes of the current war and its impact on civilians. I've seen nothing like that on Fox.

I watch "both sides" for the same reasons that pollsters sample a broad range of demographic categories to get an accurate sense of what Americans think, and I don't think both sides are just confirming their own biases. CNN/MSNBC do try to provide a wider range of views on their shows because that is what their audience wants. E.g., I just saw an interview with Ben Carson on CNN last night, in which he was very slowly repeating Trump's claim that the US was becoming a "banana republic" because it was prosecuting a former president (attempted coups, apparently, don't make us look like a banana republic). Weird seeing that injection of alternative reality into more mainstream news. I don't see such inclusions given serious air time on Fox.

*I should add that Newsmax and OANN are worse than Fox in all these respects.