Americans who get their news primarily from cable are the only people who believe that Israel is not committing a genocide in Gaza, according to a new survey that examined the relationship between attitudes toward the war and news consumption habits.
The survey puts numbers on trends that have become increasingly apparent: Cable news viewers are more supportive of Israel’s war effort, less likely to think Israel is committing war crimes, and less interested in the war in general. People who get their news primarily from social media, YouTube, or podcasts, by contrast, generally side with the Palestinians, believe Israel is committing war crimes and genocide, and consider the issue of significant importance.
Presumably a big chunk of the cable news demographic are watching Fox, which notoriously has been proven to leave its viewers knowing less than people who don’t watch news at all.
I don’t think you understand just how aligned all of the networks are on this issue.
Fox’s rhetoric is just the most obvious / laughable (assuming you have a brain)
Yeah regular viewers of CNN, which runs every story about Palestine by the IDF first, are totally on the side of genocide is happening…
Just to be clear I’m not trying to disagree with OP’s article.
Let alone set up some kind of binary where CNN is somehow exempt. I was just making an observation about this demographic.
I’m not American so I don’t see these channels but their online coverage is biased AF.
In some of the threads about Tiktok I’ve been saying that I think the generational divide is more between boomers who watch TV news cycles versus people who get more varied sources of info online. Had to watch our free-to-air TV a couple of weeks ago and the news on the Gaza Genocide was ridiculously pro IDF.
Tagging @macabrett who made a similar point to me.
This isn’t as much of a left / right issue as other things. Coverage of cable news across the entire political spectrum is running cover for the genocide.
And yet there are still lots of people on here who tell us that western media is not biased, and trot out nonsense like mediabiasfactcheck to argue why we should only consume information from mainstream western sources.
I talked to a boomer fox news watcher recently, and apparently the current party line is that since the US firebombed dresden, what Israel is doing to Gaza is justified. The US even bombed white europeans, so how can you criticize them for killing middle-easterners?
IE, nothing wrong with murdering civilians as long as the US did it first, and to criticize Israel for doing what the US already did is unpatriotic, and the protesters have no right to protest this genocide.
At least the US right is honest about their values, and make no justifications or apologies for civilian murder.
Meh, Reuters, which is pretty much the mainstream western source, has been relatively good on calling out Israel, and even funded an independent investigation that found that the IDF probably purposefully shelled one of their journalists.
Doesn’t mean that having a wider variety of sources isn’t still good, of course.
It’s becoming very difficult to hide what’s happening in Israel, so it is starting to leak into western mainstream media now. However, it’s pretty clear that there has been a strong bias from the start. And the question you should ask yourself is what other biases western media promotes in a similar fashion.
TV will be known as the lead in the pipes that drove Rome mad.
Its sad how effective tv propaganda is. I’m glad social media, despite all its flaws exists now.