Mentions Of "Conservative" Versus "Liberal" On Television News
As our nation is increasingly politically polarized, it is worth asking whether there are major differences in the usage of the terms "conservative" and "liberal" on television news. The timeline below shows the percentage of combined monthly airtime across CNN, MSNBC and Fox News mentioning the two terms over the past decade, showing that conservative is mentioned more often than liberal, historically around twice as much, but that mentions of conservatives have steadily decreased since mid-2014.
Until late 2014, MSNBC mentioned conservatives more than its peers, but since December 2015 all three channels have mentioned it in lockstep. Mentions decreased steadily since late 2019.
Conversely, mentions of "liberals" have remained constant on CNN and Fox News over the past decade, while MSNBC sharply decreased its mentions by around half starting in late 2014 and reached CNN's levels by December 2015. The end result is that Fox News now mentions liberals as many as four times as often each month than its newly-aligned peers.
