CNN host Brian Stelter got called out to his face about engaging in pushing partisan news.
During a segment on his show “Reliable Sources,” Yale assistant professor Joshua Kalla conducted a study that paid Fox News viewers to watch CNN.
Stelter’s goal was to have Kalla bash Fox News and conservatives, but the segment took a turn when Kalla’s research found that CNN and many other mainstream media outlets also engage in what he called “partisan coverage filtering.”
Below is a transcript of the exchange:
STELTER: “So, Josh, you all call this partisan coverage filtering. And basically, you’re proving what we’ve sensed for a while which is that Fox viewers are in the dark about bad news for the GOP.”
KALLA: “That’s right. Fox and CNN cover different issues, and Fox News predominantly covers issues that make the GOP look good and make Democrats look bad. And on the flip side, CNN engages in this partisan coverage filtering as well that we find. For example, during this time, the Abraham accords were signed and these were the agreements where Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain signed a major peace agreement. And we see that Fox News covered this really major accomplishment about 15 times more than CNN did. So, we established both networks are really engaging in this partisan coverage filtering. It’s not about one side, it’s about the media writ large.”
STELTER: “I think you’re engaging on both-sidesism there, Josh?”
KALLA: “Not trying to lay out a moral equivalency, it’s not about what an objective standard is, it’s really about how all networks do engage in this. And in order for viewers to get a realistic picture of the world, we need viewers to see all types of information. And unfortunately, what we find in this study is that the viewers don’t want to engage in watching all sides. So, as David mentioned, we see that viewers, we pay them for four weeks to watch CNN, but then after those payments stopped, they go back to watching Fox News. So, even though we try to incentivize viewers to watch both Fox and CNN, they don’t want to engage in that hard work, they want to really just watch the side that makes them feel good. And this is why the media has such an important responsibility to cover both sides, to hold both parties accountable.”
STELTER: “And this study has already gotten a lot of attention.”
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