CNN’s Brian Stelter has somehow managed to make a career out of bashing Fox News. CNN bills Stelter as the network’s “chief media correspondent,” but tune into his Reliable Sources show any Sunday, and Fox News is almost always the main topic of conversation.
So when a new study came out from University of California, Berkeley professor David Broockman and Yale University professor Joshua Kalla showing that Fox News viewers who were paid to watch CNN for a month were slightly more likely to have liberal views on some issues, Stelter immediately booked them for his show.
Broockman and Kalla found, for example, that Fox News viewers who were paid to watch CNN for a month were 6 percentage points more likely to believe that foreign countries did a better job of handling COVID-19 than the United States and 7 points more likely to support voting by mail.
“You call this partisan coverage filtering,” Stelter told Brookman and Kalla on live TV. “And basically, you’re proving what we’ve sensed for a while, which is that Fox viewers are in the dark about bad news for the GOP.”
“That’s right,” Kalla said, at first, agreeing with Stelter. “Fox and CNN cover different issues, and Fox News predominantly covers issues that make the GOP look good and make Democrats look bad.”
But then, Kalla continued: “On the flip side, CNN engages in this partisan coverage filtering as well as that we find. For example, during this time, the Abraham Accords were signed, and these were the agreements where Israel, the [United Arab Emirates], and Bahrain signed a major peace agreement. And we see that Fox News covered this really major accomplishment about 15 times more than CNN did. So we established both networks are really engaging in this partisan coverage filtering. It’s not about one side — it’s about the media writ large.”
When Stelter objected, Kalla added: “It’s not about what an objective standard is. It’s really about how all networks do engage in this. And in order for viewers to get a realistic picture of the world, we need viewers to see all types of information. And unfortunately, what we find in the study is that the viewers don’t want to engage in watching all sides.”
Judging by Stelter’s ratings, there is not much of an appetite for watching his side of things at all.
