Pew: Cable is Top Source of Campaign News
Report Finds Cable is Essentially flat, while TV Station Viewership Has Dropped
John Eggerton -- Multichannel News, 2/7/2012 1:11:31 PM
Cable news has overtaken local TV news as the top source for campaign news -- by virtue of not declining.
That is according to a new study from the Pew Research finding that 36% of respondents regularly get their campaign news from cable, 32% from local TV news, 26% for network news, 25% from the Internet and 20% from the local newspaper. Social media like Twitter and Facebook have played "very modest" roles, according to the study.
While cable's figure is down from the 38% who said they regularly got campaign news from the medium in 2008, that is essentially flat, statistically, while TV station viewership has dropped from its top spot of 40% in 2008.
"The one constant over the course of the past four elections is the reach of cable news," according to the Pew report.
The bad news is that 37% of the respondents said they saw a great deal of political bias in news coverage generally (up from 31% in 2008), while only 10% said they saw none.
The study was based primarily on phone interviews, landline and cell, conducted Jan. 4-8, 2012, of a national sample of 1,507 adults, 18-plus.
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