From: Ken Auletta. “Non-Stop News.” The New Yorker 25 Jan. 2010: 38
The media is under “pressure to entertain or perish, which has fed the press's dominant bias: not pro-liberal or pro-conservative but pro-conflict.”
Tend to agree with that.
“Forty per cent of Americans, according to a Pew poll last July, now get their national and international news from cable; with the collapse of mass audiences for broadcast television, networks like Fox News and MSNBC have sought niche markets, in the process shedding all but the pretense of impartiality. Data collected by TiVo, Inc., from thirty-five thousand viewers, show that for each Democrat who watches Fox News there are eighteen Republicans, and for every Republican who watches MSNBC there are six Democrats. (Democrats outnumber Republicans on CNN by a lesser two and a half to one.)”