A new study available in preprint from Joshua Kalla, an assistant professor of political science at Yale, and David Broockman, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, complicates those assumptions. It shows that cable news viewers aren’t as old, as partisan or as set in their beliefs as the stereotypes may depict.
Kalla and Broockman found that “approximately 15 percent of Americans watch an average of eight hours or more of MSNBC, CNN or Fox News per month,” which, for starters, is a fair amount of cable news. They also found that “roughly half of these networks’ audiences are either not primary voters or not registered with the party aligned with that news source” and that “young adults make up a meaningful portion” of partisan media outlets’ audience, indicating that, despite cord cutting, cable news viewing “will likely remain substantial in the years to come.”
