we have a recheck do we have scott determine if we do okay so let me get
let me get scott on the phone if we have had and scott has a i think scott spin
on the show more than anyone else good afternoon scott i dated
great socks
well thank you for having me back so i want to talk about let's cut it is the
director of survey research at the pew research center and and scott has been
on the show before elections after elections
unrelated to elections and and there was a recent study that your organization
david which relates to the public perceptions
bev news network ideology and this is something we've covered a lot on the
show and we get a lot of our listenership saying foxy
is conservatively biased on msnbc has a liberal bias and there's %uh always
discussions of well does it matter if it's the ring opinion journalism are we
just talking about news broadcasts so tell me sum up i guess if we can't just
to get started
this public perception study that you did
we simply wanted to know whether people purse
cdk each of the major news outlets
as mostly conservative mostly liberal or a meter in particular
now eyes should
preface you know this discussion with the fact that a lot of people in the
public don't understand the terms liberal and conservative and so we get
some we are results
here at that %ah have location quite a bit head scratching at least in the blog
it's fear
but in the main the results show what you would expect
%uh box news is
perceived by a wide margin as
mostly conservative forty seven percent say mostly conservative fourteen percent
said mostly liberal in twenty four percent say
neither in particular
no other network or these ballot
is perceived as mostly conservative by more than forty king percent so fox
forty seven percent mostly conservative
and the others between eleven percent and fourteen percent so tell me about
this i would love to me
meet some of these fourteen
that believe foxnews is mostly liberal and so what you're telling me if you
think that that is related to people not understood
being what liberal or a conservative means that's correct i mean it's
possible that there are some %um
berry berry berry very conservative people out there and think that
box uses
used to liberal but right mostly i think this is just confusion over what the
terms too many so when you can when you do a study like this and i understand
that it's it's the public's perception is not any kind of %uh objective study
of what is actually on
these channels do do you need to adjust in some way for the political
orientation of each networks r_d_ and so does it matter that party
used has more conservative viewers and then the other networks when we look at
these results well you know it's a very interesting the fact is that fox news
viewers %uh
the there are no work
very much the way other people receive your network
%uh for example we ask people in the poll or do you regularly watch fox news
directly watch c_n_n_ di rectly watch
imagine bc
and the percentages seeing fox as mostly conservative
rather than mostly liberal is almost identical %uh across those three groups
regular fox viewers forty eight seventeen
preggers him and the worst the parkers
fifty two sixteen percent mostly conservative to liberal
and m_s_n_b_c_ thing paying forty eight percent a fox is mostly conservative
nineteen mostly liberal someone fox news
does that they're fair and balanced what you're finding is there's actually just
as many republicans or conservatives and liberals that actually believe that
right it's if the perception seems to be the same
aim on both sides yet what happened to everybody sees bach's music
%uh you know instead work term for at least
similar percentages of each group to now one different that we find is that fox
news viewers
do not see the other networks the same way %uh that the few words that the
other networks see them
foxnews viewers were more likely to consider
all of the other news organizations
that's mostly liberal then mostly conservative a reaper either
even neither in particular
does they are
you know approx viewers cdom new mainstream media other than that
ben fox news
tilted towards the liberal side and quality true that even the viewers of
other %uh news organizations
%uh see their own news organizations is somewhat more liberal than conservative
%uh the difference here is quite substantial between help fox fewer see
the rest of it and powell baron pierre or see the rest of them
scs nearest
going to fox news as their primary news outlet and liberals moving too
according to your study msnbc cnn nbc that is is there do you see a trend that
people want to watch news that is going to have to be skewed towards the
positions they already agree with there is there something else no i think
there's there definitely is pouring out of the audience is %uh we'd we did'nt
separate now says
that looked at
partisanship and the audiences
and %uh there's a very clear trend over ten years for example the percentage of
%uh
democrats is say that they watch c_n_n_ regularly has risen from twenty five
percent back in nineteen
ninety eight to thirty three percent
in in %uh two thousand and eight
meanwhile the person to republicans is say dat day watch fox news regularly has
gone from fourteen percent ten years ago
two thirty six percent some some
more republicans are watching fox news and more
walls are watcher democrats are watching c_n_n_ it is and i think we probably
will aren't you surprised by those numbers at that right so there is a
soaring out in a segmenting of the audiences
and you know the pattern is is true even for msnbc
%uh though they have a smaller audience for example ten ten years ago ten
percent
but democrats watched msnbc regularly and %uh last year was eighteen percent
almost doubling of of the %uh incidence of democrats watching
%uh you know republican state about where they were ten years ago eleven
percent say they watch in action
he regularly so what we understand that this particular study is based on
audience perceptions if you were doing a different evaluation which is if you
were trying to be some kind of objective evaluation of political bias across
across these networks
what would you look at would you do an analysis of how the news is presented
would you look at the political orientation of the guest for the number
of guests or would you research
political donations made by producers and editors and what would you look at
it took to take a look at that side well i think all of those would with deep up
possible approaches certainly analyzing the cast
and even taking the approach that our sister project here the project for
excellence in journalism as used
%uh in their analyses what eight campaign coverage last year
they look at things like positive and negative stories about
%uh the candidates or about the president
their findings while not a direct measure of bias indicate differences in
powell
those are subject to misinterpretation because people can say well obama got a
lot of positive coverage from msnbc or from c_n_n_ last year during the
campaign
and mourned you know more neutral coverage from fox
but in fact what
that might signify is that there was a lot of good news for obama last year in
the campaign he was ahead in the polls through most of
%uh they do you know during the during the campaign there are a lot of good
things happening to them in terms of fundraising and all that generates
positive
cover it kalia says yes to somehow or just for reality right i mean well
that's right in the innovative if there is a if if good things are happening
curtis somebody whether it suppressed under our party or or or a candidate
and the coverage is going to tend to be that way because people are going to be
saying good things