‘Birthing centers for polarizing rhetoric’: The outsize influence of Fox, CNN and MSNBC

5/27/19
 
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from The Washington Post,
5/26/19:

With their limited, aging viewership, you might think cable TV news would be a political afterthought and a business washout.

Instead, revenue is astronomical — $5 billion in 2017, according to Pew Research, for the big three: Fox News, CNN and MSNBC.

All of this despite the fact that their actual audience is relatively small and quite old — the typical Fox News and MSNBC prime-time viewer is 66, with CNN’s somewhat younger.

And viewership is a fraction of the audience still flocking to the three nightly news half hours on CBS, NBC and ABC: There are more than 9 million viewers for David Muir’s top-rated ABC show, “World News Tonight,” compared with cable’s top-rated competitors, Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow, who each draw about a third of that number.

So why do they loom so large?

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