Unpacking media bias in the growing divide between cable and network news

Abstract

Abstract The potential for a large, diverse population to coexist peacefully is thought to depend on the existence of a public sphere in which citizens are exposed to similar facts about similar topics. A generation ago, broadcast television news was widely considered to serve this function; however, since the rise of cable news in the 1990s, critics and scholars have worried that the corresponding fragmentation and segregation of audiences has caused this baseline of common understanding to be lost. Recent work documents that millions of Americans are loyal consumers of cable TV news stations. However, the implications of partisan segregation in TV news consumption depend on bias in content—which topics TV news programs talk about and the language they use to talk about them. Here, we measure bias in the production of TV news at scale by analyzing nearly a decade of TV news (Dec. 2012–Oct. 2022) on the largest cable and broadcast stations. We quantify the share of attention each station devoted to more than 20 politically significant topics as well as the linguistic similarity of different stations’ news coverage of those topics. We find that while broadcast news continues to cover similar topics with similar language, cable news stations have become increasingly distinct, both from broadcast news and from each other, diverging in terms of both content and language. This trend is driven by hard news as much as partisan commentary programs. Our results show that changes in the supply, not just consumption, of TV news are contributing to Americans’ polarizing media diets.