Erica Moser, Penn Today
Walter Cronkite was often cited as “the most trusted man in America” as he delivered the news on CBS in the 1960s and ’70s — a time when fewer news options created a “shared reality” that scholars argue fostered civic engagement, empathy, and shared national identity. The situation looks quite different in today’s disparate media landscape.
Much scholarship has focused on how the decline in a common baseline of facts has increased polarization and decreased trust in institutions, but less attention has been paid to whether — or in what manner — separate realities have become more common. Additionally, analyses have largely detailed online news, whereas television accounts for five times as much news consumption for average Americans.
A team from the University of Pennsylvania’s Computational Social Science Lab (CSSLab) — a joint venture of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, Annenberg School for Communication, and Wharton School — has spent years analyzing bias in TV news produced between December 2012 and October 2022. They coded more than 13.4 million hard news and talk/opinion segments from three broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — and three cable stations — CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.
The findings show that while the broadcast channels continued to cover similar topics with similar language over the decade, cable stations increasingly diverge from each other and from broadcast news in the topics they cover and the language used. Meanwhile, “viewers of broadcast news receive largely interchangeable news regardless of which station they watched or when in time they watched it,” the authors write. Their findings are published in Nature Scientific Reports.
“To our knowledge, this is the most comprehensive study to date of topical focus and polarization across major U.S. TV news networks,” says senior author Duncan Watts, director of the CSSLab and a Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor.