Partisan cable networks such as Fox News and MSNBC were analysed in an article by Adam J. Schiffer from Texas Christian University. Particularly, the author analyzed how and why members of the US House of Representatives were mentioned in the networks.
In American cable networks, Fox News is particularly enamored with the discussion of “The Squad” – four Democratic congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Ilhan Omar (MN), Ayanna Pressley (MA), and Rashida Tlaib (MI), known for their strident left-wing views and social media savvy. The reason may be that they are believed to reflect poorly on the party for Fox’s White Christian, conservative-leaning viewers – thus, the choice of presenting them as the face of the party is tactical.
Recent studies indeed confirm, that ideologically extreme members of the congress receive more coverage (Wagner and Gruszczynski 2018;Padgett et al. 2019). Hence, the author makes two hypotheses: 1.(structural distortion): The networks distort the composition of each party similarly, in a manner predicted by shared news values. H 2.(partisan distortion): The networks distort the composition of the parties to make their aligned party look good and the opposition party look bad.
For data, the years analyzed were 2019-2022, and all mentions of House members in MSNBC and Fox were counted using Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer. NOMINATE scores were used to measure congressional ideology.
According to the results, the median Democrat on both networks was somewhat extreme and had higher social media presence than the average. The attributes were more distorted on the opposing media, Fox. Republicans were distorted in the same direction, and more distortion by MSNBC. Both networks also highlighted the loudest “outrage entrepreneurs” and scandal-ridden members from the opposing party.
Lastly, mentions were less commonly studied than appearances, and thus some new insights were added, but there were also limitations. The author suggests combining the approaches in the future.
The article “The Crooked Pictures in Our Heads: Partisan Cable Coverage of Congress.” by Adam J. Schiffer is in Social Science Quarterly. (Open access).
Picture: Fox News Channel icon in 3D. By Rubaitul Azad.
License Unsplash.
