Amplifying the nation's political division has been good business for Fox News Channel and MSNBC during this season of anger -- but it may come at a price.
President Obama has complained about a coarsening of political dialogue and cable-news cycles where "the loudest, shrillest voices get the most attention." After a summer of raucous health-care forums, South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson felt free to shout that Obama was a liar during a speech to Congress.
The president pointedly snubbed Fox during last week's Sunday-morning TV tour, leading Fox's Chris Wallace to say that the administration is "the biggest bunch of crybabies I have dealt with in my 30 years in journalism."
As this was going on, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reported that public attitudes toward journalists were at their worst level in nearly 25 years of surveys.
Six in 10 Americans consider news organizations in general to be politically biased, according to the Pew study. Also, the number of people who say that news stories are often inaccurate (63 percent) is higher than at any time since Pew began asking about this in 1985.
With a more relaxed view about mixing facts and opinion, people have a harder time distinguishing between the two, said Marcy McGinnis, a former CBS News executive who is now a professor at Stony Brook University.
"It's very distressing to be in a world now where I'm teaching young people to be journalists, and they're confused about what they're seeing on television," she said. "They wonder why they can't say what they believe in when they're doing a news story."
MSNBC and Fox officials declined to talk for this story.
With the networks filling up so much time with heated political rhetoric, there's a concern that "the daily national conversation is framed at the fringes," as Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez recently put it.
"You can help your ratings but there can be long-term consequences," said Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. "Personally, I think everyone who is a journalist should be worried about the state of journalism."
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