About the Project

In a long 8,000-word interview in the September 2010 issue of Rolling Stone, President Barack Obama took a swipe at one of the country’s most formidable news outlets.

Fox News Channel, the President said, pushes “a point of view that I disagree with. It’s a point of view that I think is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country.”

Obama compared Fox News to the papers owned at the turn of the 20^th century by media titian William Randolph Hearst, the godfather of yellow tabloid journalism and the source of inspiration for Orson Welles’ classic film Citizen Kane.

Presidents clashing with the media isn’t a new phenomenon, especially presidents looking for flattering coverage, yet Obama’s remarks only magnified the cultural significance of the cable news channel.

At the end of March 2011, Fox News Channel wasn’t just the most watched cable news channel, but was the third most viewed cable channel in America, even topping ESPN during primetime.

Yet the debate surrounding Fox News since its inception in 1996 has been how much of its content really is news, since the most recognizable faces of the network are conservative stalwarts like Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.

Going from a straight news perspective to a more personality driven approach has garnered Fox News skyrocketing ratings and profits, forcing its cable news competition to emulate much of its playbook in order to compete.

Since adopting a Fox-like strategy to court a more liberal audience in 2006, MSNBC has since seen a dramatic rise in both their ratings and profits.

CNN meanwhile has tried sticking to a traditional straight news style format, a style that has kept the network’s ratings in disarray. The cable news formula is simple: viewers want personality driven content.

Yet what we don’t know is how much news is actually in cable news. If former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said he believes that “Fox News isn’t a news organization,” then why are so many people watching Fox News and MSNBC over traditional network broadcasts?

A comprehensive study would need to be done to figure out how much cable news outlets dedicate to news and how much they dedicate to opinion content.

The goal in this project is to establish a link that suggests viewers want personality and opinion driven content in their news, which is why cable news outlets are catering to those viewers and are thus raking in obscene profits.

In order to view these cable networks from a statistical perspective, we first need to look at them from a historical perspective.

How did the networks get to this point where they became so significant to Americans? And why has the traditional newscast gone by the wayside in favor of personality driven entertainment?

Why are individuals like former ABC Nightline anchor Ted Koppel equating cable news to ponzi schemers like Bernie Madoff and saying how bad cable news is for democracy? Is cable news really that bad for us?

One thing we know for sure is: cable news is obscenely profitable, and with the large ratings it garners, it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.