The Pew Research Center published a fascinating report on political polarization and the media a few months back. The report contains this chart, based on survey data of people who say they've read, watched, or listened to different media outlets. It shows how consistently liberal or conservative the average audience member of 32 different media outlets is:
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One interesting finding here is that even the politically polarized cable news channels, Fox News and MSNBC, have notably less ideologically consistent audiences than many other web or print publications. This likely has to do with TV as a mainstream medium — people without strongly formed views may be more likely to get their political news from TV, rather than tracking down print publications or seeking out news on the internet. Among internet news sources that were widely used by survey respondents, the average readers of Yahoo News and Google News also have mixed or unclear ideologies.
Meanwhile, every print publication tracked, from the Washington Post to the New Yorker, had audiences that leaned liberal — except for the Wall Street Journal, whose audience was just slightly more conservative than average. A cluster of talk radio and internet media sources like Breitbart and The Rush Limbaugh Show have the most conservative audiences. And there's a variety of outlets and programs with very liberal audiences, from NPR to Al Jazeera America to Slate and the New Yorker.
Head over to Pew for the full report, by Amy Mitchell, Jeffrey Gottfried, Jocelyn Kiley, and Katerina Eva Matsa.
