CNN’s Brian Stelter appeared taken aback on Sunday when a guest on the Sunday talk show “Reliable Sources” accused the cable network of being “partisan.”
Joshua Kalla, an assistant professor at Yale University, was invited on the air to discuss a recent study he conducted in which Fox News viewers were paid money to watch CNN for seven hours a week during September 2020.
Kalla told Stelter that Fox News wasn’t the only cable news network that was engaging in “partisan coverage filtering.”
“Basically, you’re proving what we’ve sensed for a while,” Stelter told Kalla. “Which is, Fox viewers are in the dark about bad news for the GOP.”
To which Kalla replied: “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.”
He then added: “On the flip side, CNN engages in this partisan coverage filtering as well.”
As an example, Kalla cited CNN’s lack of significant coverage of the Abraham Accords, the Trump-brokered peace agreements among Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
“Fox News covered this really major accomplishment about 15 times more than CNN did,” Kalla said.
“We saw how much both networks are encouraging in this partisan coverage filtering. It’s not about one side, it’s about the media writ large.”
Stelter offered some pushback, telling Kalla: “I think you’re engaging in some both-sides-ism there, Josh.”
“Not trying to lay out a moral equivalency,” Kalla replied. “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 the study is that the viewers don’t want to engage in watching both sides.”
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This is an excerpt from the New York Post.
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