Pew: Cable Is Top Source of Campaign News

Report finds that cable is essentially flat, while TV station viewership has dropped

By John Eggerton -- Broadcasting & Cable, 2/7/2012 12:40:23 PM

Cable news has overtaken local TV news as the top source for campaign news, though by virtue of not declining.
 
That is according to a new study from the Pew Research Center that finds that 36% of respondents regularly get their news campaign news from cable, 32% from local TV news, 26% for network news, 25% from the Internet and 20% from the local paper. Social media like Twitter and Facebook have played "very modest" roles, according to the study.
 
While cable's figure is down from the 38% who said they regularly got campaign news from cable in 2008, that is essentially flat, statistically, while TV station viewership has dropped from its top spot of 40% in 2008.
 
"The one constant over the course of the past four elections is the reach of cable news," says the Pew report.
 
The bad news is that 37% of the respondents said they saw a great deal of political bias in news coverage generally (up from 31% in 2008), while only 10% said they saw none.
 
The study was based primarily on phone interviews, landline and cell, conducted Jan. 4-8, 2012, of a national sample of 1,507 adults, 18-plus.