Our Shared Reality

Television is the dominant source of news for most Americans and has traditionally provided the U.S. with a shared reality: a common set of facts and perspectives about a common set of issues. Here we show that this source of shared reality is diminishing, but not in the way most observers fear. First, the major cable networks (CNN, FNC, MSNBC) have indeed diverged from each other and from the major broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC), covering different topics with different language; however, broadcast news remains relatively homogeneous. Second, the audience of majority broadcast news consumers has declined substantially, mostly due to an overall exodus from news consumption, but continues to dominate the corresponding audience for cable.

To estimate the presence and severity of topic selection across different stations, we computed the proportion of news airtime devoted by each station to 24 topics that cover a combination of socially polarizing issues (e.g. abortion, immigration, gun, climate change), issues that became salient due to specific events (e.g. vaccination, China, Russia), and issues that are of perennial relevance to US politics (e.g. healthcare, energy, education, the economy) and society (e.g. disasters, drugs, crime).

Fraction of airtime.

Consumption of news.

We look at both consumption and production of news!

References

2024

2022