That's the thing...it's so awful. Just completely toxic nonsense. It shocks me people are so addicted to it, but it sure says a lot of (not good) things about humanity.
Pretty much every white person has an elderly relative or three who have Fox News on 12 hours a day and they vote in every election possible. Explains a fair amount of things.
Fox News is a cancer on America. I used to think my parents were intelligent. They started warching Fox News and are now bigots who parrot ridiculous nonsense without any critical thinking involved.
I realize they were likely already closet bigots, but it's so much worse now.
It means of the people who prefer prime time news from 24 hour cable news channels, they prefer to be lied to by fax over cnn. Many people get news elsewhere because they prefer facts over spin.
Watching CNN sometimes feels like visiting a dying retail store. The guest are often webcaming in (often poorly lit) and it just feels like a shadow of its former self.
I’m well past the point of caring about cnn, but I do still get the feeling that the people who actually make decisions about public policy, the direction of the parties, etc still watch this crap (and the brain dead Sunday shows). It’s not great.
The old new leadership that tried to rebalance them destroyed their brand the same way WaPo did. If you go out of your way to "un-bias" yourself you are going to lose credibility.
The danger of this echo chamber of false narratives should scare any rational person to death! FOX prime time is nothing but opinion masquerading as news. Unfortunately, I have seen some of the same on the other channels as well.
A lot of Democrats are so obsessed with working the refs (NYT/CNN/MSNBC) that they’re avoiding the more uncomfortable question — what if legacy corporate media doesn’t matter much at all for elections going forward? What fills the vacuum?
I see your point, but focusing on audience numbers can be a myopic way to look at the impact of media. For instance, I bet that an extremely large share of Democratic politicians and staffers read the NYT and watch CNN/MSNBC, and I think that their coverage influences those people.
That’s right, but it only intensifies the problems for Dems. Dems perceive NYT/CNN/WP/WSJ to be the center of the conversation, obsess over them, rage at their headlines and chyrons, get into a discursive feedback loop. Meanwhile if everyone was even a casual CNN viewer the country would be D+25
I agree. I think the more misguided version of this is “right-wing media doesn’t matter bc only XX million people consume it,” when the media can drive the kinds of information that people get far beyond the direct audience.
Also, what happens within the coalition also matters. “Liberal media” bending over for Trump, as seems to be happening, could have a profound demoralizing effect for Democrats.
This is also where the evisceration of local media shows up. Successful pols used to temper a focus on prestige/national media with what newspapers back in their district were saying. But increasingly there just aren’t any papers back in their districts.
True, but I think that's the issue: the audience for NYT/WaPo/CNN/MSNBC is now overwhelmingly people who reliably vote Democratic, which makes them useless as a way to reach anyone on the fence or build new coalitions.
Neither side can create its own refs. The whole idea of refs implies impartiality. Fox "News" is propaganda. Democrats, for the most part, don't want to respond in kind. They just want someone to expose the lies without creating false equivalencies to appease the other side.
It shouldn’t be a concern of how many watch or where. The importance is whether information will be truthful. All those networks are pretty corrupted. Unfortunately only going to get worse.
The reach is diminished compared to pre-election and FOX/MSNBC, but it's still a lot more than 400k. But I don't know if there's a good way to measure the stuff like who viewed clips on social media and such?
I don’t share the both-sidesism philosophy of corp media leadership (a farcical appeal for broad appeal/revenue) and haven’t watched 5 cumulative minutes of any of them in weeks.
Would love to see this chart for the same time periods for 2020. Me thinks this is just a winning vs losing an election dynamic and nothing truly structural beyond that.
But neither CNN nor MSNBC had to pay three quarters of a billion dollars to settle a defamation suit, that's not even counting the money Rudy Giuliani had to pay after lying to Americans.
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Is this true? There's Dutch media that has more viewers, I have trouble believing this.
I realize they were likely already closet bigots, but it's so much worse now.
Was it just the permissive bigotry? Being told that bigotry is AOK is more powerful than wanting the truth about anything?
about those three places is beyond me. Literally almost no viewership.
Old pew research data since it’s my only relevant hit on mobile: https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2013/10/11/how-americans-get-tv-news-at-home/
I had dinner with a low-info-voter type friend from Chicago the other day. The kind of guy who retired from the CBOT when it went electronic.
His question, “what do you think of this Marc Andreessen guy?”
1) Viewership would go up
2) He would get less attention
There’s a lot more to cover than domestic presidential politics but they choose to cover 24/365.
Doesn't that matter anymore, FFS!?!
https://bsky.app/profile/conorsen.bsky.social/post/3lddqz7ovkk2g