Numbers show increasingly partisan media audiences
John Harwood, in a New York Times Caucus blog titled “If Fox Is Partisan, It Is Not Alone,” presents evidence that “partisan fragmentation throughout America’s news media and their audiences has grown significantly.”
Harwood — noting that he appears on CNBC and MSNBC — reports these findings from Will Feltus, a Republican specialist in voter targeting:
Mr. Feltus charted the rising partisanship of television news audiences using data from Scarborough Research, a partnership of the Nielsen Company and Arbitron Inc.
In audience surveys from August 2000 to March 2001, Fox News viewers tilted Republican by 44.6 percent to 36.1 percent. More narrowly — 41.4 percent to 39.4 percent — so did the audience for MSNBC. The audiences of CNN, Headline News, CNBC and Comedy Central leaned Democratic.
Four years later, amid the Iraq war and President George W. Bush’s re-election campaign, the audience data had shifted. Fox News viewers had become 51 percent Republican and just 30.8 percent Democratic, while MSNBC viewers leaned Democratic by 41.7 percent to 40.4 percent. Viewers of CNN, Headline News, CNBC and Comedy Central grew slightly more Democratic.
By 2008-9, the network audiences tilted decisively, like Fox’s. CNN viewers were more Democratic by 50.4 percent to 28.7 percent; MSNBC viewers were 53.6 percent to 27.3 percent Democratic; Headline News’ 47.3 percent to 31.4 percent Democratic; CNBC’s 46.9 percent to 32.5 percent Democratic; and Comedy Central’s 47.1 to 28.8 percent Democratic.
Harwood reports that Feltus thinks President Barack Obama is making a mistake by taking on Fox News:
Mr. Feltus predicts the strategy will backfire by offending the subset of Fox viewers who Obama might otherwise be able to lure with his policies on issues such as health care. “If I were the Obama White House, I’d make my target uninsured people who watch Fox,” he said, because “I’ve got the answer to their problem.”
Besides, Mr. Feltus observed, winning over the other side starts with working to understand it. “As a Republican, I sometimes watch Keith Olbermann,” the MSNBC host, he said, though “I can usually only do it for 10 minutes.”
Steve Parker is the deputy managing editor for news, and oversees the Post-Dispatch's front page. STLtoday's online news editors are on his newsroom team. Parker has been at the paper since September 1980. 
If you drink from the cup of the far right wing racist fascist corporatist neocons, watch Faux News. If you want something which more approaches objective reality, skip Faux News and go somewhere else!
I love it!!
Comedy Central, Home of Southpark, Jeff Dunham, and an endless marathon of Scrubs repeats is viewed as a “media news outlet.”
Hogan, as a lawyer I would think you would not engage in liable and slander. Could you give me just one example of anything “faux” Fox has reported? Just because Keith Olbermann doesn’t cover it, does not make it fake. Funny how Olbermann never had John Edwards on as “worst person in the world” isn’t it? Try putting some facts behind your “faux” blogging Hogan.