If somebody like Rush Limbaugh had a nationwide radio show where day by day he created content based on RNC talking points.
Or a network like Fox or MSNBC went all in on party loyalty and based all their content on party talking points.
Or a media conglomerate like Sinclair or Clear Channel pushed out political messaging to their affiliates in small markets that had to be aired during prime viewership.
oh wait...
This is also what Facebook is doing. However, since they have the advantage of being able to complete personalize your feed to give you what you want, they can provide 100% coverage across all demographics.
It's about providing validation and reassurance.
Which doesn't always require telling people what they want to hear, but it certainly helps.
Rush and Fox and Breitbart exist because there is a need -- millions of people who are seeking emotional validation that their worldviews are correct.
It's the same reason left-leaning publications exist. Emotional validation disguised as news.
Fox News is an an outreach of Trump's political apparatchik. MSNBC was never particularly close to Obama.
But Fox News literally coordinates with the Trump team and he lavishes them personally with praise via Twitter almost every week. It's far more akin to campaign outreach rather than independent news. This never happened with Obama or the DNC.
MSNBC also does have independent journalists e.g. Chuck Todd and right-wing commentators e.g. Hugh Hewitt, Joe Scarborough etc. So it's not entirely liberal.
Except of course when CNN gave the debate questions to Hillary in advance. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/07/do...
Now it pushes the Trump line, but this is due to the fact that Fox News rightly recognizes that its viewers want their biases confirmed.
CNBC is business news; did you mean MSNBC?
MSNBC has the least viewership of the three and I would not consider it particularly influential. It is biased towards a minority ultra-Democrat position, hence its relatively lower viewership due to its fringe editorial content.
Lest ye be Roy Moore’d (or Anthony Weinered), it is a mistake to take a bad actor and extrapolate isolated statements or conduct to the greater organization without evidence of a trend.
However, CNN is the topic. Don’t think for a minute if Trump or another Republican achieves greater than 50% popularity, CNN won’t swing that way. Negative coverage of Trump was en vogue before CNN started doing it, not the other way around.
If MSNBC wasn’t close to Obama, it’s certainly in alignment with many progressive thought leader types. Fox and MSNBC are similar animals, it’s just that the Republican platform is simpler and smaller than the “big tent” Democratic platform.