Republicans favor Fox for news source

The nation’s political divide is increasingly being reflected in where Americans get their news, a new study shows: Republicans like Fox News Channel and Democrats prefer CNN.

Fox’s audience has grown explosively since 2000, with most of those gains coming among viewers who describe themselves as Republican or conservative, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

ABC, CBS and NBC evening news viewers are slightly more likely to be Democrats than Republicans, according to the survey. Pew found little partisan tilt is the audience for MSNBC, the struggling third cable news network.

As recently as 1996 — the year Fox News Channel came on the air — CNN’s audience was more Republican than Democratic.

“To a certain extent, the media has reaped what it has sown,” said Andrew Kohut, the Pew center’s director. “The emergence of the ‘shout show’ as a significant piece on all of the cable networks … has made the news seem more partisan and Republicans increasingly look at the news one way and Democrats the other.”

Fox’s “fair and balanced” slogan has helped convince many Republicans that other news organizations tilt left, Kohut added.

Due largely to Fox, cable news continues to grow as a favored outlet for news while the broadcast networks’ ratings are flat. The Internet is also growing as a news source, and bringing in more older and minority computer users, Pew said.

While six in 10 Americans aged 65 and older say they read a newspaper on a typical day, only 23 percent of people under age 30 read a paper regularly, the study showed.