The difference between MSNBC and Fox News

Whereas Fox News’ bread-and-butter is criticizing President Obama, the liberals at MSNBC … criticize President Obama:

While much attention has been paid to the feud between the Fox News Channel and the White House, the Obama administration is now facing criticism of a different sort from Ms. Maddow, Keith Olbermann and other progressive hosts on MSNBC, who are using their nightly news-and-views-casts to measure what she calls “the distance between Obama’s rhetoric and his actions.”

While they may agree with much of what Mr. Obama says, they have pressed him to keep his campaign promises about health care, civil liberties and other issues.

“I don’t think our audience is looking for unequivocal ‘rah-rah,’ ” said Ms. Maddow, who calls herself a liberal but not a Democrat.

Truth be told, I can barely watch Keith Olbermann. I find Maddow more palatable, but not enough to catch her show every night. But MSNBC isn’t just the leftward version of Fox News; it has conservative hosts on its air, and its liberals are more willing to go after one of their own.

Lou Dobbs quits CNN

I don’t watch much cable news — I’d like to keep my blood pressure from spiking — so this doesn’t really matter much to me. I guess it’s just amazing to me that a journalist who kept the “birther” rumors alive in the mainstream media far longer than they deserved still has the least bit credibility. Then again, Pat Buchanan is on the air at MSNBC, playing the part of everybody’s racist grampa, so what do I know? This is probably why I don’t watch much cable news.

Fox News, CNN and partisanship in the news

Piece in the Times today claims that Fox News merely reflects a return to the 19th century practice of partisan journalism — but that it’s not alone. Just check out the audience numbers.

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.

This is all very interesting, but it doesn’t really tell us anything about the journalism — or propaganda — being purveyed by the respective cable news networks. (Why the hell are they measuring Comedy Central in there, anyway?) It’s true that MSNBC features more straightforward liberals in its lineup than the other networks — but it also has former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough in the morning. CNBC has Reagan-worshipping free market prophet Larry Kudlow as a key part of its lineup. CNN has Lou Dobbs. And Headline News was Glenn Beck’s first television home, lest you forget.

So it’s not necessarily the case that all the non-Fox networks decided to appeal to Democrats as a business strategy. It seems just as possible — just as likely, in fact — the demographics have changed because conservatives have decisively fled the non-Fox networks for the warm ideological tongue bath they get from Fox. That’s left the other networks with only Democrats as their audience. And as the lineup of stars above suggests, they still don’t cater to their ideological audience as thoroughly as Fox News does. Suggesting, as the Times does today, that Fox isn’t all that unusual flies in the face of common sense.