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0 pointscoldtea5y ago0 comments

>Fox viewership quite literally tuned out the opposing viewpoint, while MSNBC/CNN viewership did not.

If you think that, you're a partisan that has tuned out the opposing viewpoint :-)

I mean, the reason MSNBC/CNN viewership didn't tune out during the time "house impeachment managers presented evidence" was because that was already their own viewpoint.

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Terretta5y ago· 2 in thread

The Nielsen ratings timelines show a fact not a motive.

It is factual that viewers of one channel tuned out during an opposing viewpoint, viewers of the other two channels did not tune out during an opposing viewpoint.

Your assertion may be why MSNBC/CNN didn't tune out during house presentations, but doesn't explain why they didn't tune out during defense presentations.

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Meanwhile, research on "approach-avoidance" behavioral patterns suggests there is a partisan difference in the degree of partisanship one needs one's sources to exhibit:

There's also good evidence that this kind of "selective exposure" is disproportionately powerful among Republicans. "One study found that adding the FNC logo to a news story increased the probability that Republicans would choose to read the story by 25 percentage points, whereas adding CNN’s logo or NPR’s logo reduced the chance by 10 points," Grossmann and Hopkins write. "No equally strong effects occurred among Democrats."

http://pcl.stanford.edu/research/2009/iyengar-redmedia-bluem...

The concern I'm raising is not that, but this:

"Thus, as the audience become polarized over matters of politics and public policy, rational media owners stand to gain market share by injecting more rather than less political bias into the news (Gentzkow & Shapiro, 2006). ... A further implication of voters’ increased exposure to one-sided news coverage is an ‘‘echo chamber’’ effect—the news serves to reinforce existing beliefs and attitudes."

The system needs a way to systematically correct for this.

coldteaOP5y ago

>Your assertion may be why MSNBC/CNN didn't tune out during house presentations, but doesn't explain why they didn't tune out during defense presentations.

That's the case with the Fox audience too: your assertion doesn't explain why they tuned out during defense presentations as well.

Terretta5y ago

They didn't.

In any case, I didn't intend to make an assertion whether this is a one side problem, but highlight that not all participants are exposing themselves to all information. Borrowing the most neutrally or bi-partisan phrased positioning of the problem from the research I linked above:

"Republicans preferred to read news reports attributed to Fox News and to avoid news from CNN and NPR. Democrats and liberals exhibited exactly the opposite syndrome—dividing their attention equally between CNN and NPR, but avoiding Fox News. This pattern of selective exposure based on partisan affinity held not only for news coverage of controversial issues but also for relatively 'soft' subjects such as crime and travel."

I intended to relay a concerning metric illustrating this problem, to motivate a step back and ask what can be done to address that "‘Possessing understanding’ cannot be parenthetical."

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> If you think that, you're a partisan that has tuned out the opposing viewpoint :-)

FWIW, I watched exhaustively, and on Fox News.

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