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This should not come as news to anyone, considering the following from PIPA (pdf) in October 2003:
Misperceptions, The Media and The Iraq War
…The extent of Americans’ misperceptions vary significantly depending on their source of news. Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions. Those who receive most of their news from NPR or PBS are less likely to have misperceptions. These variations cannot simply be explained as a result of differences in the demographic characteristics of each audience, because these variations can also be found when comparing the demographic subgroups of each audience…
{emphasis added]
And here’s the latest from The Pew Research Center For The People & The Press, August 17, 2008 (pdf):
Partisan Profile of TV News Audiences 2008
Of those who regularly watch…
Fox News Channel
Rep: 39%
Dem: 33%
Ind: 22%
Don’t know: 6%Nightly network news
Rep: 22%
Dem: 45%
Ind: 26%
Don’t know: 7%MSNBC
Rep: 18%
Dem: 45%
Ind: 27%
Don’t know: 10%CNN
Rep: 18%
Dem: 51%
Ind: 23%
Don’t know: 8%NewsHour
Rep: 21%
Dem: 46%
Ind: 23%
Don’t know: 10%General public
Rep: 25%
Dem: 36%
Ind: 29%
Don’t know: 10%
Not a surprising correlation, eh?
Then, there’s this little gem in the Pew (pdf) report:
Since the early 1990s, the proportion of Americans saying they read a newspaper on a typical day has declined by about 40%…
…These trends have been more stable in recent years, but the percentage saying they read a newspaper yesterday has fallen from 40% to 34% in the last two years alone. Newspapers would have suffered even greater losses without their online versions…
And nightly network news has suffered a bigger decline.
That probably explains this:
Monday, June 16, 2008
Kansas City Star will lay off 120…Tracy Hazen, The Star’s director of marketing, said in an interview Monday that The Star will cut about 120 jobs across all divisions. The newspaper will make the cuts on Monday, she said…
Let’s diminish production of content and keep people even less informed! Of course, a proper business plan would dictate that one hasten the demise of the goose that laid the golden egg.
Do you think that if you provided content people might actually show up to read what you wrote? I wonder where some of those people might have gone?