Gerbner

The major broadcast networks may still offer a middle-of-the-road news course, but more and more people who watch television get their news from highly partisan sources, including Fox News, MSNBC, and the Daily Show, in addition to the thousands of interest groups on the Internet offering articles, republications and blogs that likely match the viewer/reader’s political sentiment. Whereas the researchers here categorized their subjects according to how much media they received, the choices were far more limited at the time of this study. Moreover, where the heaviest viewing of television in the early 1980s might have been more concentrated among the less educated, today the most cutting edge technologies, that compete for the traditional television audience, are first available to the highest earners, frequently the highest educated.Today heavy consumers of home-based entertainment media have thousands of additional choices, many of them offering information or a perspective on that information. News is now less by professional news values and more by the popularity within a particular niche.