Eighty-seven percent (87%) of Fox News viewers say they are likely to vote for John McCain, while those who watch CNN and MSNBC plan to support Barack Obama in November by more than two to one.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 65% of CNN voters plan to vote for the Democratic candidate versus 26% who intend to go for the Republican. Similarly, MSNBC watchers plan to vote for Obama over McCain 63% to 30%.
Only nine percent of those who watch Fox News say they will vote for Obama.
It is true that CNN and MSNBC viewers favor Obama by significant margins, but still nowhere near the 78% margins by which Fox viewers favor McCain. In fact, it is quite plausible that CNN and MSNBC are offering very "balanced" coverage, but because so many conservatives have turned to Fox, their viewer ship is slanted. Conservatives didn't like the balance, so they went to Fox.
Now, that isn't something I am necessarily opposed to. Personally, I read my news almost entirely from progressive sites like Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo. Other than that, I get my news from aggregators like Google News, and from large email listservs that discuss politics. There is only so much aggravation a person needs every day, and as long as you are dealing with intellectually honest outlets, there is nothing wrong with just getting your news from fellow progressives.
The problem comes in when Fox viewers turn out to be highly uninformed about basic facts in the current political environment. The Pew Center found Fox viewers to be the second lowest informed audiences of all news outlets, ahead only of network morning shows. While blogs were only barely better than Fox, the survey didn't separate out progressive and conservative blogs. Given that Daily Show and Colbert Report viewers had the highest knowledge base, and given the broad popularity of those shows within the progressive blogosphere, I feel pretty comfortable believing progressive blog readers actually scored pretty high.
So, not only is Fox excessively slanted toward Republicans, with their viewership favoring McCain by nearly 10-1 margins, they also appear to be the least informative news network of all. Yeah, I can see a lot of good reasons for Democrats to go on a network like that.
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