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The partisan divide in how Americans view media companies is wide and getting wider, according to a new survey from Morning Consult.
Out of the 15 companies that showed the biggest gap in net favorability between Republican and Democratic respondents in the survey, 12 were media companies. While Trump Hotels won the prize for most polarizing brand, with a gap of 86 percentage points between how respondents from the left and right viewed the company, almost the entire rest of the list is made up of news organizations.
For every media company that was part of the survey in 2018, that favorability gap grew over the past year. CNN, the number-two company on the list, saw that divide increase by 14 points, thanks mostly to a 12-point hike in the number of Republican respondents who had a negative view of the network.
Not surprisingly, the tale is similar (though the political slant is reversed) for Fox News, where the increasingly negative view of the network from Democratic respondents resulted in a favorability gap that grew by 19 points.
The real story with Fox, however, is that the divide is not simply between left-leaning and right-leaning media—it’s between Fox and just about everyone else. While a broad range of companies (CNN and the New York Times as well as NBC, CBS and ABC News) were favored more by Democrats than Republicans, the brands favored by Republicans (Fox News, FOX, Fox Business and Fox Nation) all live under the same corporate umbrella.
And despite the negative effect that increasing polarization may be having on the country as a whole, there’s one place where it’s reaping benefits. The study notes that viewership was up at CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, all of whom appear on the list. For the three combined, revenues have risen 36 percent since 2015, with profits up 50 percent.
Trump’s love-to-hate daily read, the Times, has also posted record print and digital subscriptions.
With the number of local newspapers dwindling, the national companies on Morning Consult’s list are gaining an ever-greater share of the public’s attention, the study says.
“We seem to be missing an independent objective news source that people can agree on,” said Joe Barone, managing partner of Brand Safety Americas for media-buying firm Group M, told the study’s authors.
Trump Media & Technology Group today reported a $58.2M net loss on $4.1M in 2023 revenues, a disclosure that drove its stock price down 22.6 percent to $47.96.
Barry Pollack, an attorney at Wall Street’s Harris St. Laurent & Wechsler, has registered Julian Assange as a client with the Justice Dept. “out of an abundance of caution.”
Paramount Global to slash 800 jobs in what chief executive Bob Bakish calls part of an effort to “return the company to earnings growth"... Rolling Stone editor-in-chief Noah Shachtman is exiting at the end of the month due to disagreements with chief executive Gus Wenner over the direction the magazine is taking... The New York Times broke the $1 billion barrier in annual revenue from digital subscriptions in 2023... Press Forward is investing more than $500 million to strengthen local newsrooms.
The majority of news articles are read within the first three days of publication, according to a recent report.
The Los Angeles Times gives pink slips to 115 people or 20 percent of its newsroom staff... TIME is also laying off about 30 employees, which is approximately 15 percent of its editorial staff... The Baltimore Banner, which was launched by Stewart Bainum in 2022 after he failed to buy the Baltimore Sun, added 500 subscribers per day in the three days following Sinclair Broadcast Group's deal to purchase the Sun.
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