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The cable news that Patchwork Nation communities watch

Dante Chinni

Posted: 09.08.2008 / 9:33 AM PDT

The past two weeks of the presidential campaign were about the candidates and parties defining who and what they are – or at least who and what they would like to be. The conventions in Denver and the Twin Cities tried to craft images and messages for the final two months of the campaign.

In the next few weeks, there will be bumps and drops in the polls as the electorate tries to make sense of it all. And there will be different interpretations of the story lines.

How you see Sen. Barack Obama (change agent or inexperienced youth) or Sen. John McCain (maverick Republican or President Bush’s heir) may depend on where you go for news. There are points and counterpoints on the Web and on the radio, as well as on cable news – where the approaches and viewpoints are becoming increasingly different.

CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC may argue that they do not push any clear views in their coverage, but there are clear differences in their audiences. Consider that the night of Senator Obama’s acceptance speech, 8.1 million viewers tuned in on CNN, while 4.2 million watched Fox, according to Nielsen data. The next Thursday, the numbers were flipped: Senator McCain’s speech brought in 9.2 million viewers on Fox and 4.8 million on CNN.

MSNBC had 4.1 million viewers for Obama and 2.5 million for McCain.

One possible conclusion: Democrats seem to be turning more to CNN and MSNBC in 2008, while Republicans seem to watching Fox.

Beyond viewership numbers, there do seem to be different approaches in the news channels’ campaign coverage. Consider how CNN and Fox handled coverage of McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Last week in an interview with a senior McCain campaign staffer, CNN anchor Campbell Brown doggedly asked for specifics of Governor Palin’s experience credentials in a well-publicized back-and-forth. Meanwhile, over on Fox, the coverage was gentler, with many of those on the air, including political consultant Dick Morris, claiming Palin was receiving unfair treatment because of the “deep sexism that runs through our society.”

So considering these different approaches, where do our 11 Patchwork Nation county types go for cable news? Using questions about media consumption from 2004 Annenberg surveys, we found some clear differences that could bode well for Obama and the Democrats in terms of framing their message.

When people who had watched cable news the week before were asked to name their favorite cable-news channel, CNN got the highest scores in four community types: America’s most densely populated areas (“Industrial Metropolis” counties); places with more young, single people (“Campus and Careers”); rapidly growing and diversifying locales (“Boom Towns”); and educated suburban enclaves (“Monied ’Burbs”).

Those last two groups are likely to be particularly important in November because they hold large numbers of voters and in 2004 they were “battlegrounds,” where the vote between Mr. Bush and Sen. John Kerry was close.

The biggest Fox News fans came from places with strong ties to the armed forces (“Military Bastion” counties), communities with higher numbers of African-Americans (“Minority Central”), areas with large numbers of evangelical adherents (“Evangelical Epicenters”), and rural agricultural locales (“Tractor Country”).

Those four groups, it should be noted, have all been reliably Republican over the past two presidential campaigns (2000 and 2004).

If you believe, as many do, that there are differences in the political leanings of the major cable-news networks, then the fact that more “battleground” areas watch CNN might be good news for Obama.

But remember, too, that the Annenberg poll results came from 2004 – and Bush defeated Senator Kerry in that election.

It’s also worth noting that just because a cable-news channel is someone’s favorite, that doesn’t mean it’s where this person gets most of his or his news. The media environment is complicated in 2008 with ideas, allegations, and story lines moving among outlets.

If nothing else, the numbers at least suggest that different kinds of people look to different kinds of outlets to shape their worldviews.