Bias increases in cable/online news (as opposed to broadcast news)

A team of researchers from the Computational Social Science Lab at the University of Pennsylvania find that cable news has increasingly diverged from broadcast news in the topics covered and language used.

Excerpt: Walter Cronkite was often cited as “the most trusted man in America” as he delivered the news on CBS in the 1960s and ’70s — a time when fewer news options created a “shared reality” that scholars argue fostered civic engagement, empathy, and shared national identity.

The situation looks quite different in today’s disparate media landscape.

Much scholarship has focused on how the decline in a common baseline of facts has increased polarization and decreased trust in institutions, but less attention has been paid to whether — or in what manner — separate realities have become more common. Additionally, analyses have largely detailed online news, whereas television accounts for five times as much news consumption for average Americans.