#Shocking: Pew study finds 85% of #MSDNC’s content to be opinion commentary

My first thought on this was “only 85%”? Via Politico:

MSNBC offers viewers far more commentary and opinion than either Fox News or CNN, according to a new study, but all of the big three cable networks are increasingly focused on partisan talk and debate.

Opinion filled 85 percent of the content on MSNBC, according to theΒ Pew Research Center’s 2013 State of the News Media report. On Fox News, commentary made up 55 percent of its coverage, while CNN was the only of the big three cable news channels to produce more straight reporting than opinion. Even so, story packages and daytime live event coverage on CNN was cut down by about half between 2007 and 2012, the report found.

In its study of the cable networks in late 2012, Pew reported that commentary and opinion was “far more prevalent on the air” than straight news reporting, with 63 percent of the airtime devoted to talk compared to 37 percent dedicated to reporting. CNN’s coverage was made up of 54 percent reporting compared to 46 percent opinion, while MSNBC had just 15 percent reporting. Fox News, meanwhile, fell between the two with 55 percent commentary and 45 percent reporting.

Overall, the cable news landscape has undergone a major shift as β€œdaytime programming now resembles primetime, with interviews and opinion replacing coverage of live events and breaking news,” the report stated. Interview segments are up 31 percent from 2007 to 2012, while live event coverage dropped 30 percent.

And more broadly, the report β€œpinpoints multiple signs of shrinking reporting power” across the media spectrum. There are now fewer than 40,000 employees working in newspaper newsrooms, the lowest since 1978, and estimates for newsroom cutbacks puts employment down 30 percent since its peak in 2000, Pew reported. On local TV news, coverage of government and politics has been cut in half, with sports, weather and traffic now making up 40 percent of the content for viewers. And about one in three people, or 31 percent, said they stopped going to a particular news outlet because they felt it no longer offered them the news they were used to getting.

β€œThis adds up to a news industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into its hands,” the report said.

According to Pew, that shift was best represented by the 2012 presidential election. Campaign reporters, Pew wrote, β€œacted more as megaphones, rather than as investigators of the assertions put forward by the campaigns.”

MediaTruer words were never spoken …

In any event, the MSDNC information from this studyΒ should be an eye opener for all those anti-“Faux News” types who routinely try to paint Fox News as the only “blatantly biased network out there” — but, sadly, it won’t. Β  HISS (Head In Sand Syndrome) is quite widely spread among liberal elitists who Know Better Than You when it comes to issues like media bias masquerading as “straight reporting.” Β Remember, they’re the ones who have, for decades, tried to lump in opinion pages and programming (like the WSJ op/ed page and Rush) with “straight news” outlets like Fox News to prove that there is more “conservative media bias” than liberal bias. Β This, in spite of the fact that there is a distinct difference in opinion publishing and programming versus straight news publishing and programming. Β This Pew study makes the distinction conservatives have been making for decades between “opinion/commentary” and “straight news reporting” but the left and other notoriously knee-jerk hate-Fox types like the clueless wonders at Media Matters and Think Progress will continue to not let facts get in the way of a good ol’ fashioned fact-free rant. Β You know how the old saying goes: You can lead a donkey to water but you can’t make him drink it.

Or something like that …..

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