The Messenger Overwhelming the Message: Ideological Cues and Perceptions of Bias in Television News

These surveys were conducted by the American Society of Newspaper Editors (1999), the Gallup Organization (2003), and the Pew Research Center (2005).

Although Fox News Channel has recently been on top in the competition for ratings, it is conceivable that either network could be in first place with the other in second place, depending on when one examines the ratings. The important point, however, is that both networks outpace their cable news competitors.

This poll was conducted on behalf of Media Matters for America by the Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group, Washington, D.C., in November 2004.

This research was conducted in accordance with the guidelines set forth by the Human Subjects Committee of the Office of Research at Florida State University. A detailed explanation of these guidelines can be found at www.research.fsu.edu/humansubjects.

The State of the News Media 2004 study, conducted by Journalism.org, confirmed that foreign policy stories were a major part of cable news broadcasts when this study was conducted, as this type of story constituted 24% and 21% of the broadcast time on CNN and Fox News Channel, respectively. However, this is not always the case, which raises questions regarding whether these results extend to all periods and forms of news coverage. Within the confines of my data, I can determine whether respondents reacted differently to domestic and foreign news stories. They did not, as the difference of means between foreign and domestic stories originating from CNN and Fox News was only .16 and .15, respectively, and not statistically significant. Therefore, it does not appear that the mix of domestic/foreign stories influences the nature of results one way or the other. However, additional attention is warranted regarding the possibility that perceptions of ideological bias differ for domestic vs. foreign news stories.

The anchor identified his network affiliation in three different ways. First, at the beginning of the broadcast, the anchor stated: “This is Phil Streetman reporting for CNN/Fox News.” Second, during the stories the anchor would use phrases that conveyed network affiliation without changing the tone of the story, such as “CNN/Fox News has learned...” or “sources have told CNN/Fox News...”. Finally, the anchor signed off using the network taglines: “This is Phil Streetman for CNN, the most trusted name in news” and “This is Phil Streetman for Fox News, where you always get fair and balanced coverage.”

Individual professors had control over the manner and amount of extra credit that was awarded. As a result, participants were rewarded for their participation at varying degrees depending upon what class they were enrolled in. However, I have no reason to believe that the participants were aware of this fact, and I also do not believe that this had any influence on the opinions they provided in the experiment.

A reliability analysis was conducted to determine if constructing a summary variable was appropriate. The summary scale was found to reach an acceptable level of reliability (Cronbach's α = 0.81). In addition, item-total correlations range from .405 to .523, which fall within the recommendation of between .30 and .70 put forth by Kerlinger (1986).

“Anchor appearance” served as a measure of how telegenic the anchor was to the respondent. “Anchor tone of voice” served as a measure of how well the anchor vocally delivered the news. “Anchor level of knowledge” measured how intelligent the respondent thought the anchor was. “Anchor trustworthiness” measured whether the respondent trusted the anchor, and “anchor objectivity” measured whether the respondent thought the anchor was delivering the news in an ideologically neutral manner.

I ran additional models that included control variables for media use patterns (i.e., network preference, hours per week watching TV news, propensity to read the newspaper, propensity to visit online sites, newspaper and/or website used most frequently) as well as three-way interactions between ideology, content, and network attribution. The variables failed to reach significance and did not make a significant contribution to the model. As a result, they were dropped from the final analysis.

CNN content was used in the analysis presented in Figure 1. FNC content could have been used, but given the small coefficients and the high levels of insignificance associated with the content variable and the interaction between content and ideology, no significant substantive difference would have emerged by creating the figure using content presented by the other network.