Late Monday morning, reacting to a news Quinnipiac University poll about network trustworthiness, the Washington Post's Hunter Schwarz, at the paper's "The Fix" blog, pointed to Fox News's dominance and declared "For millions of Americans, Fox News is the mainstream media."
Perhaps more surprising than Fox's dominance, but clearly supporting the statement Schwarz made, is the collective poor showing turned in by the Big 3 broadcast networks, whose combined most-trusted percentages came in just below Fox's.
Here is the Qpac poll's trustworthiness breakdown to which Schwarz referred:
Fox's 29 percent "most trusted" plurality is greater than the 28 percent seen in ABC, CBS, and NBS combined.
A few excerpts from Schwarz's post:
... Fox News' figures are unsurprising considering its ratings. The channel ended 2014 second only to ESPN in total viewers among all ad-supported basic cable networks. Its "America's Newsroom," "The Five," "Special Report with Bret Baier" and "The O'Reilly Factor" were the most-watched shows in their time slots among all cable stations. Put simply: Fox News is a ratings juggernaut.
... While Fox News is bolstered by the right, MSNBC doesn't get the same support from the left. The poll found that more Democrats trust CNN (32 percent) and NBC News (15 percent) than MSNBC (14 percent, tied with CBS News).
... Fox News' dominance puts its frequent complaints about the "mainstream media" into perspective. For millions of Americans, Fox News is the mainstream media.
As seen above, CNN beats Fox in the 18-34 age group. But as Pew has reported in a separate study, that demographic is watching far less TV of all kinds.
Fox's most-trusted percentage might in reality be a bit greater. While acknowledging that this is not an apples-to-apples comparison, it more than a little odd that only 3 percent of Democrats say they trust it the most, but that in 2012 Democrats made up 22 percent of the network's audience. Perhaps many Democrats' expressed polling sentiments don't reflect their true evaluations of network reliability in real life.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
