Pew: Cable Is Top Source of Campaign News

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.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.