How cable news broke journalism — and America
As the United States marks its 250th birthday, Straight Arrow is taking a fresh look at the institutions, systems and social contracts that shaped modern America — and the pressures now testing them.
On the day that conservative pundit Charlie Kirk died, so, too, did the relationship between a daughter and her mother.
Ezra, a 35-year-old human resources specialist from Portland, Oregon, didn’t pull the trigger — but still, she said, she couldn’t escape the blame.
As news of Kirk’s politically motivated assassination last September ricocheted across the globe, the tragedy attracted massive audiences to television news programs that flooded the airwaves with round-the-clock commentary. Viewership spiked at Fox News, in particular, where conservative host Jesse Watters declared that Kirk’s critics — namely Democrats, like Ezra, who opposed the 31-year-old activist’s divisive rhetoric — were “at war with us.”
Ezra’s mother, a devoted Fox News viewer, had been primed for years to become a culture war foot soldier. In a barrage of text messages, Ezra said, her mother didn’t pin Kirk’s death on the accused gunman, Tyler Robinson, who texted his roommate and romantic partner after the shooting that he’d “had enough of his hatred.” She pinned the blame on “democrat violence” more generally — and on Ezra, specifically.
“She said, ‘You hate Charlie Kirk and God and Trump and me,’” Ezra told Straight Arrow. Ezra asked that Straight Arrow withhold her last name due to avoid further fueling family division.
The conversation marked a tragic falling out between Ezra and her mother, an outcome that Ezra said was the direct result of divisive cable television news. As a growing number of people go “no contact” with their loved ones — making the difficult choice to end relationships with family members to break cycles of toxicity that harm their mental wellbeing — Ezra isn’t the only one who blames the 24-hour news cycle for the growing partisan divide tearing apart families, friendships and communities.
It’s a predictable outcome, perhaps, of a 24-hour news ecosystem engineered for outrage. Turns out, nuanced explanations of complex policies don’t capture audiences the same way as vitriol.
Never before in the nation’s history has so much news been available to so many people so quickly and in so many formats. But in the decades since Ted Turner launched the Cable News Network in 1980 as an innovation that freed information from 30-minute evening news programs and gave rise to round-the-clock talking heads and punditry, a significant body of research points the blame on cable television for ruining the news — and America’s soul.
“She started saying, ‘You hate me’ over and over and I said, ‘You know mom, you need to stop,’” Ezra recalled. “She kept saying it and I said, ‘If you don’t stop, I’m not going to talk to you anymore.’”
Unable to reconcile their differences, the two haven’t spoken since.
How cable news emulates ‘Monsters, Inc.’
Twenty-four-hour broadcasting demands 24 hours of content, every day. But there is rarely 24 hours of new information that improves the public’s understanding of the world around them. The result: a rise in sensationalism and partisan bickering as cable stations increasingly shift priorities from presenting information to manipulating emotions — TV designed to keep eyeballs glued to screens between prescription drug commercials.
This dumbing down of the news has given rise to a culture where the loudest voice wins. Audiences have taken notice.
These days, Maury Giles told Straight Arrow, cable TV is less like the evening news from generations past and more like the “scare floor” in the 2001 Pixar movie “Monsters, Inc.” The animated movie’s main characters, monsters James P. “Sulley” Sullivan and Mike Wazowski, scared unassuming children and captured their screams as a source of electricity.
“That was a kids’ show but it touched upon some power principals true to humanity: that it’s much easier to play to our base instincts as humans to get attention,” said Giles, the CEO of Braver Angels, a nonprofit that seeks to disrupt partisan division through community-based, participatory conversations. The easiest way for outlets to keep viewers hooked, he said, is to generate fear.
“What better way to get you afraid than to frame everything as a zero-sum game, in the political sphere at least,” Giles said. “That this next election, if your tribe doesn’t win, then everything you know to be true in your life is done.”
Ezra said she was always an anomaly while growing up in a conservative Catholic household where “Rush Limbaugh was our pope.” After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, she said, her mother began watching Fox News round-the-clock. Ezra said her mother hasn’t been the same person since.
“She turned on the news that morning and watched the second plane hit live, and she never turned the TV off after that,” Ezra said. “She listens to it every moment she’s home. It’s on the entire time she’s asleep. It’s pretty intense.”
In the past decade, academic researchers have largely turned their attention to social media as a key driver of “echo chambers,” where people are spared information containing opposing viewpoints, and “filter bubbles,” where algorithms curate and present information to people based on their browsing habits. The introduction of smartphones and social media allowed people to read, share and fume about the news whether they’re at home, driving their car or hiking in the woods.
Ezra acknowledged her news diet is largely funneled through the algorithm on social media platform Reddit, where she’s an active participant in “r/FoxBrain.” The subreddit community describes itself as “a support group for people who struggle with family and friends who have succumbed to the paranoia, xenophobia and hatred pushed by Fox News and other extreme right wing news sites.”
Yet, most Americans’ news diets most closely resemble that of Ezra’s mom. Despite the rise of digital media, Americans remain five times more likely to get news from televisions than websites. Survey results also indicate Americans would rather watch TV news than read online sources — a reality that’s remained consistent over the past decade.
Two channels, two realities
Much of the public debate about political polarization incorrectly assumes that algorithmic amplification — driven by recommendation engines on YouTube and other social media platforms — is the primary cause is incorrect, said Homa Hosseinmardi, an assistant professor of data science and computational communication at the University of California, Los Angeles. Rather, polarization is driven by user choice: people, she said, actively choose news sources that align with their beliefs.
Social media gave researchers a window into polarization, Hosseinmardi told Straight Arrow, but the partisan divide came long before Facebook. Social media “made it possible for us to observe” political differences in our communities, she said, “and now we are all shocked by all the things that are happening.”
Partisan polarization is especially pronounced among the audiences of TV news, which is effective in keeping its viewers hooked, according to a 2022 report that Hosseinmardi co-wrote for the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances. Such partisan segregation, researchers conclude, increasingly spares audiences information about opposing viewpoints — with serious consequences for democracy.
In the analysis of Americans’ online browsing and TV viewing habits between 2016 and 2019, the researchers concluded that some 17% of Americans are “partisan-segregated through television” news compared to 4% through online sources. Even as the number of people who turn to their TVs for information shrinks broadly, audiences who tune into partisan programming have grown.
The widely divergent news viewing patterns between Democrats and Republicans were apparent in a 2025 Pew Research Center survey. Democrats were far more likely than their Republican counterparts to use a wide range of outlets — and also expressed greater trust in the information they consume. While Democrats turn to a number of major news sources for information, including the cable networks CNN and MS NOW, formerly known as MSNBC, Republicans have largely coalesced around a singular outlet: Fox News.
“Republicans are largely concentrated around a very small group of sources,” said Kirsten Eddy, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center, where she focuses on Americans’ news habits and attitudes. For viewers on the right, Fox News has become “the centerpiece of a very small ecosystem.”
Eddy noted that age has become an important factor in news viewing habits. While 35-year-old Ezra acknowledged that she uses Reddit to find news, young adults are more likely than older Americans to tune out the news altogether. The median age of all U.S. adults is 47. The median Fox News viewer is 55.
The age divide has implications for the news business as a whole — and for family dynamics.
“We’re seeing platforms die out in real time as we watch younger groups move away from television news, radio and print,” Eddy said. “I think age will continue to become a more and more important story as we move forward.”
How TV divides us
In the 1960s and 1970s, Walter Cronkite dominated Americans’ attention as anchor of the “CBS Evening News.” At the time, Hosseinmardi wrote in a 2025 report, Cronkite was hailed by many for creating “a common baseline of understanding” among Americans that, in turn, served as “a sort of social, cultural and political glue” that fostered civic engagement and empathy.
“Even if they disagreed about the meaning of what they heard or what they should do about it,” Hosseinmardi wrote, “for 30 minutes every evening Americans across the political spectrum consumed the same set of facts about the same set of events.”
Over time, the quality of information has degraded while growing increasingly partisan, according to a 2025 study that relied on artificial intelligence to analyze “virtually all news segments aired” on ABC, CBS and NBC between 1969 and 2024. Researchers documented a pivot toward “soft” stories about celebrities, political scandals and “horse race” elections coverage.
At the same time, cable television, in particular, has become increasingly partisan — especially since President Donald Trump’s first election in 2016. The worst offenders of media bias in cable news hold slots in prime time.
People who tune into the broadcast networks ABC, CBS and NBC receive “largely interchangeable news regardless of which station they watched,” the 2025 study found. But cable networks like Fox News and CNN are a different beast, routinely turning to “partisan coverage filtering” while emphasizing stories that align with their viewers’ political ideologies. Fox News, for example, is more likely than other networks to present stories about taxes, immigration and terrorism. MS NOW — which was known as MSNBC during the study’s analysis — emphasized stories about abortion and ethnicity.
Therefore, the fragmentation in Americans’ media diets isn’t just about what people choose to watch — it’s about what networks choose to show them. The outcome, Hosseinmardi told Straight Arrow, is “a big divergence in our shared reality.”
Why nobody trusts the news
Investigative journalist and author Charles Feldman was there to watch it happen. In 1985 — five years after CNN went on the air — he joined the network as an on-air investigative correspondent specializing in coverage of terrorism and organized crime.
These days, he’s a critic of cable news and what he describes as a rush for speed over accuracy and context. In 2008, he co-wrote the book “No Time to Think: The Menace of Media Speed and the 24-Hour News Cycle.” Since then, he told Straight Arrow, journalists’ rush to get there first has only accelerated “at an exponential rate.”
The outcome, he argues, is a degradation in credibility and a rise in misinformation. He compared the modern media ecosystem to an emergency room where doctors and nurses work “at hyper speed” and are forced to make decisions quickly. With elective procedures, meanwhile, doctors have more time to ponder the best course of action.
“The same holds true for the quality of information: If you have a day to think about something, you have a better perspective than if you had five minutes,” said Feldman, now the host of the podcast “SOSAmerica.” In a rush, “you’re less likely to come up with an accurate diagnosis, whether it’s in a medical center or in the political sphere, than you are if you are if you have more time to mull it over and think about it.”
As news broke, he recalled, he was “often pushed, literally pushed, out the door” and asked to perform. Live. On air. Over and over again. Twenty-four hours a day, with an expectation that each new segment is different from the last.
“If somebody was glued to their TV set, they didn’t want to keep hearing and seeing the same thing over and over again, so that put an enormous amount of pressure on producers and reporters to keep coming up with new information” he said. “And sometimes that information was right, and sometimes that new information was premature or it was wrong.”
The result is a stream of stories that may not be directly relevant to most Americans’ lives, like coverage in 2014 of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 and, more recently, wall-to-wall updates about Maine Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner’s personal relationships.
It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that a sizable number of Americans distrust the information they’re being fed — and of journalists’ ability to act in the public interest. Recent polling by the Pew Research Center found that 56% of adults said they trust the information they’re getting from national news organizations. That’s down 20 percentage points from 2016.
At the same time, 52% of U.S. adults said they feel exhausted by the barrage of information flooding their TV screens and social media feeds, and a similar share said that most of the news they encounter has no relevance to their lives.
Eddy, of the Pew Research Center, said distrust in the media is part of a broader phenomenon: growing disbelief in institutions more generally. There’s a growing movement, she said, away “from trusting institutions broadly toward trusting the individual — trusting my own expertise over, for instance, the expertise of others.”
“Across political parties, many Americans perceive an agenda of some sort when it comes to the news media,” Eddy told Straight Arrow. “Large majorities of Americans think that U.S. news organizations are at least somewhat influenced by either corporations and financial interests or by government and political interests.”
Can’t we all just get along?
Feldman isn’t confident that change is coming. If anything, he said, networks’ rush to fill the airwaves with breaking news will only intensify. Perhaps, he pondered, the remedy can be found within people.
“You’re not going to get a solution from the institutions delivering the information, the solution has to be with the people who are receiving the information and learning how to better evaluate it,” he said. “People have to be taught from a very early age to think critically and how to verify and check information — and how not to jump to premature conclusions.”
Giles, the Braver Angels CEO, said adults could learn a lesson from “Monsters, Inc.” In the end (spoiler alert), Sully and Mike discover that “laughter was infinitely more powerful” than children’s screams.
It’s up to news organizations, Giles said, to reconsider “monetizing conflict and chaos” before it’s too late.
In the meantime, he said, individuals have to bridge their partisan divisions. Through his work at Braver Angels, he hopes to disrupt the echo chambers that reinforce division. Rather than trying to change minds, he said, the organization convenes structured events in communities nationwide for people to have civil conversations “that help us see each other as humans and fellow Americans, rather than Republicans or Democrats.”
Ezra, the 35-year-old human resources specialist from Portland, said she hopes to one day reconnect with her mother. The first, and most important, step toward reconciliation, she told Straight Arrow, would be a heartfelt apology.
“My mom and I were very close and I miss talking to her,” Ezra said. “I really wish it didn’t have to be this way, but I don’t see it changing as long as she’s consuming the things that she consumes.”
Round out your reading
- Not red or blue: America’s politically homeless middle.
- Peter Thiel’s ‘Dialog’ network was super-secret. A data leak changed that.
- The novel legal strategy that Taylor Swift and Matthew McConaughey are using to fight AI.
- Illinois balances budget with new $200 million social media tax that tracks in-state users.
- When Trump serves up ‘Just the News,’ it comes with a side of bias.
Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
