A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences confirms what we already know about the Trump years: Legacy media took a hard turn to the Left. Meanwhile, they all wondered why trust in media was declining so sharply.
The study focused on “measuring the media bias in cable TV news coverage over the last decade” and did so by determining the screen time of right-wing and left-wing pundits, activists, and politicians that appear on the networks. This way, the researchers were able to see how much the audiences of Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN were being exposed to liberal or conservative viewpoints. (Hosts were not included in the measurements).
There are several interesting takeaways. For example, the study found that CNN was “consistently to the right of MSNBC” between 2011 and 2015, but that was no longer the case from 2015 onward. Around 2018, the three shows comprising each network’s afternoon programming had similar partisan scores, and all three networks followed roughly the same trends, skewing more conservative between 2015 and 2018, when Republicans were winning elections, and more liberal since 2018, when Democrats won the House of Representatives.
Compound that with the left-wing antics of hosts on CNN, and it’s clear how sharp of a turn liberal media outlets took over the last few years. Perhaps most notable, though, is that the study found that both CNN and MSNBC skewed further Left in 2021 than they had at any point in the last decade, while Fox News (except for its prime-time shows) has returned to its pre-Trump levels.
This study provides yet another metric to show how partisan cable news is. While everyone understands that Fox News is a conservative network, and most people generally know that MSNBC skews Left, CNN spent years pretending to be nonpartisan. Its corruption in the time since has helped drag down trust in media. A majority of Americans have little or no confidence in television news.
Liberal reporters are OK with liberal bias, but nobody else is.
Given the current state of legacy media, those trust issues won’t go away. Outlets such as CNN have embraced their role as liberal platforms, and conservatives are prepared to no longer humor their faux-neutrality. The media landscape has changed for good, because it is a lot harder to rebuild your reputation than it is to burn it down.
