Fox Remains Dominant Right-Wing Political News Source, But Newsmax, OAN Gaining
- by Joe Mandese @mp_joemandese, March 23, 2021
While Fox News Channel remains the dominant source
for political news among Republicans, especially conservative ones, newer TV news rivals Newsmax and OAN (One America News) have made significant inroads.
According to findings of a new study released this morning by the Pew Research Center, 43% of Americans overall got news from Fox News in the past week, while only 10% got it from Newsmax and 7% got it from OAN.
But among Republican and/or Republican-leaning Americans, the percentages jump to 62% for Fox, 21% for Newsmax, and 14% for OAN.
Not surprisingly, the percentages jump even more among Republican respondents who identified themselves as conservative vs. moderate/liberal (see chart below).
The survey -- which was fielded among more than 12,000 U.S. adults earlier this month -- also found all three conservative news channels index highest among men, especially older and non-college-educated ones.
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The results are not surprising but one has to note the very high weekly reach claims found in this study for consumption of "political" news. If the findings are to be believed, just about every adult uses "linear TV" news to get political reports, commentaries, etc. per week. And Fox's weekly reach is 43% just for "political news. But Nielsen keeps telling us---based on meter surveys---that about 15% of all adults don't watch any "linear TV"program per week while a Nielsen Local Watch report for the second quarter of 2020---at the height of the boom in TV news consumption during the early stages of the Covid-19 debacle---found that only 31% of all adults living in TV homes watched any cable news channel in a week. Which means that Fox probably attained a weekly reach which was lower than the all -channel cume.
Of the two sources, I tend to accept Nielsen as the most accurate, which means that Pew is not really getting a tight fix on weekly reach but, rather, more of a much longer term cume and, perhaps, a lot of respondents are just giving impressionistic answers. It may also be that asking people about "political" news at this highly polarized time triggers over claiming to unknown degrees. Still, the Pew study is interesting---even if it may provide an inflated picture of "political" news consumption.