The diminishing state of shared reality on US television news

TL;DR

This study investigates the decline of shared reality in US television news, revealing that cable news diverges in content and language, while broadcast remains more unified, but overall news consumption is decreasing due to broader shifts in media habits.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of production and consumption data, demonstrating the divergence in cable news and the resilience of broadcast, offering new insights into the decline of shared reality.

Findings

Cable news networks have become increasingly distinct in content and language.

Broadcast news remains more unified compared to cable.

Overall news consumption is declining, driven more by shifts away from news than cable growth.

Abstract

The potential for a large, diverse population to coexist peacefully is thought to depend on the existence of a ``shared reality:'' a public sphere in which participants are exposed to similar facts about similar topics. A generation ago, broadcast television news was widely considered to serve this function; however, since the rise of cable news in the 1990s, critics and scholars have worried that the corresponding fragmentation and segregation of audiences along partisan lines has caused this shared reality to be lost. Here we examine this concern using a unique combination of data sets tracking the production (since 2012) and consumption (since 2016) of television news content on the three largest cable and broadcast networks respectively. With regard to production, we find strong evidence for the ``loss of shared reality hypothesis:'' while broadcast continues to cover similar topics with similar language, cable news networks have become increasingly distinct, both from broadcast news and each other, diverging both in terms of content and language. With regard to consumption, we find more mixed evidence: while broadcast news has indeed declined in popularity, it remains the dominant source of news for roughly 50\% more Americans than does cable; moreover, its decline, while somewhat attributable to cable, appears driven more by a shift away from news consumption altogether than a growth in cable consumption. We conclude that shared reality on US television news is indeed diminishing, but is more robust than previously thought and is declining for somewhat different reasons.