Pew Research Finds Opinion Dominates MSNBC More Than Fox News

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Jack Mirkinson reports that Pew Research Center's annual "State of the Media" study found that, since 2007, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC have all cut back sharply on the amount of actual reporting found on their airwaves. Cheaper, more provocative debate or interview segments have largely filled the void. Pew found that Fox News spent 55 percent of the time on opinion and 45 percent of the time on reporting. Critics of that figure would likely contend that the network's straight news reporting tilts conservative, but it is true that Fox News has more shows that feature reporting packages than MSNBC does. According to Pew MSNBC made the key decision to reprogram itself in prime time as a liberal counterweight to the Fox News Channel's conservative nighttime lineup. The new MSNBC strategy and lineup were accompanied by a substantial cut in interview time and sharply increased airtime devoted to edited packages. The Pew Research examination of programming in December 2012 found MSNBC by far the most opinionated of the three networks, with nearly 90% of MSNBC's primetime coverage coming in the form of opinion or commentary."

Comments

Re:Seems useless

[maxwell demon]

Opinion is always biased.

Of course. But what the OP was talking about is the parts not marked as opinion, but the reporting parts, which should be as objective as possible. What the OP questioned is how much of that reporting is actually biased, and thus not truly reporting (he also questioned how much of it is simply incorrect, which is already a strong hint he wasn't talking about the opinion part).

And yes, it's not really possible to be 100% objective even in reporting, but good reporting goes as close to that as possible. Biased reporting, on the other hand, is worse than marked opinion, because it makes the opinion look like hard facts.

In German public TV they once had a very nice demonstration of this: They purposefully made two oppositely biased "documentations" about the same East-German city (the report was a short time after the German re-unification). Both of them reported only hard facts, yet one of them painted the picture of a declining city which was essentially doomed, while the other one told the story of a booming city with a great future. And both did do it in a quite convincing way.