More seriously, the Pew people go into detail about their methodology. Like
Appendix B: The News Sources | Pew Research Center's Journalism Project
First, I was replying to doubtingt's false assumptions about the survey, which did not "prove" what he said it did. In particular, he claimed that conservatives use 5.5 sources while liberals use 6.7 sources and then said the slight difference is "misleadingly small, because conservatives are not using different news organizations but really just Fox News plus Beck, Hannity, and Limbaugh."
His conclusion was that PEW showed that liberals use a much greater variety of news sources and later added "...all liberals and conservatives have the same number of choices, because they all could choose to watch any outlets available. What is shows is that conservatives have no interest in exposing themselves to a variety of information and views."
However, the methodology used cannot support the claims he made. This is obvious. That liberals and conservatives had the same choices from a limited PEW selected list,
The list that is not selective against major conservative sources, since the general news outlets in tv, print, online, and radio with the largest audiences were included. IOW, PEW used rating and circulations information and went through an iterative process of whether people had heard of various outlets to create a list that included the right-wing general news outlets that notable numbers of people actually attend to. If their audiences are too small, then it means few conservatives (or anyone else) actually use them, so including them in the final version of the survey would have had little impact on the results. In addition, some of your suggested sources are not general news outlets, like Forbes which is a bi-weekly publication focused narrowly on investment and finance matters. The research question is about where people go for general news across topics, so including Forbes would make as much sense as including National Geographic, Nature, and Science (guess which political ideology reads more of those?).
Those are big-name sources, whether you like it or not. Stomping one's feet and holding one's breath until one turns blue won't change that.
Nor will red herrings over "big name sources" make your bluster relevant to the points raised. PEW's selected some "big name" sources based on general circulation, and other sources based on undefined criteria for niche choices. Why they chose some over others is not entirely clear, but if the final list includes more liberal sources (for whatever valid or invalid reason) then there will be a greater number of sources for liberals to chose from.
The list does not include more "liberal" sources. In fact, it includes more sources that are extremely and overtly conservative by any objective measure than it does sources that are equally liberal. Fox, Hannity, Beck, and Limbaugh are far more extremist and consistently right wing with near 100% editorializing/opinion based segments than any of the sources most frequented by liberals on that list. In addition to other studies showing this (and any reasoned analysis), this is supported by the fact that most of those conservative sources are distrusted by even "mixed" independents and Limbaugh is not even trusted by those that are "mostly conservative", whereas the most used sources by liberals are trusted by independents, and viewed as neutral (not distrusted) even by "mostly conservatives". You are trying to define a source as liberal just because liberals are willing to use it. But a full analysis of the pattern of data shows this is false. Strong Liberals rely mostly on sources that moderate liberals and "mixed" independents use and trust and that even moderate conservatives do not distrust, whereas strong conservatives distrust and do not use anything but extreme conservative outlets that liberals of all degree distrust and most of those sources are distrusted or not trusted by independents, and Limbaugh is not even trusted by moderate conservatives.
Nor does say anything meaningful about who uses more "variety". If the liberal group reads 7 publications that say the same thing, and the conservative group reads 5 publications that say the same thing - what kind of "variety" is that? Only a liberal would think a choice between the NYTimes and Washington Post, or PBS and NPR reflect their desire for greater "variety" and "openness to other views".
No, any rational person looking at the evidence would view the sources used by liberals to have more variety than those used by conservatives. The data I just referred to above supports this, as does the simple fact that outside of Fox, the most used sources by conservatives are the definition of extreme invariance in perspective since they are a single person espousing purely editorial style opinions, in contrast to the extensive news outlets relied upon by liberals that each contain numerous journals anchors, journalists, show formats. No matter your baseless claims that all the journalists on NPR or CNN are "the same", it is impossible for them to be as monolithic as the single extremist editorializing partisan individuals that comprise most of the indivudal "outlets" that conservatives rely upon. IOW, if Beck is a "outlet", then NPR alone counts as 10-20 "outlets" if comparing equal grain size units of "outlets".
Apparently for network and cable news it is that ABC,CBS,NBC, and MSNBC are all MSM choices for liberals. Foxnews is the only choice for conservatives. Liberals have more liberal broadcast and cable channels to choose from so, guess what, they use a 'greater variety' of these sources.
Nonsense. Unless conservative do not get those channels where they live, then they can just as easily choose them as anyone. The data does not show what choices are available but what people choose. Those sources are trusted by independents and most of them are either trusted or at least not distrusted even by moderate conservatives. This is because objective analysis of their content shows little that is as blatantly and extremely biased as the major conservative outlets and a relatively wide range of programming and perspective. Remember, all of them had programming that was mostly uncritically on board with Bush's Iraq Invasion until well after it was a clear failure and even conservatives began to pull their support for it. Strong conservatives reject these sources because they alone "distrust" any source that gives multiple perspectives and does not monolithically and extremely favor the most conservative viewpoint. Liberals also disagree with a great deal of what is on these broadcasts, because if everything they say was agreeable to strong liberals then we'd see moderates and independents distrusting or at least not trusting these sources. Unlike strong conservatives, strong liberals generally trust and are willing to expose themselves to outlets that contain some programming they disagree with. That is what the data shows.
Apparently for public broadcasting it is a choice between PBS or NPR for liberals, and nothing for conservatives. So yep, liberals use a 'greater variety' of these choices.
Apparently for International media organizations liberals can use BBC, the Guardian and Al Jazeera America. There are no conservative international news organizations. Yep, more "variety" for liberals.
Same nonsense. Al Jazeera is the only public or international outlet that is strongly liberal or as blatantly partisan as Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh, Drudge, or Breitbert. Any reasoned content analysis shows this and it is supported by the PEW data through the fact that Al Jazeera is the only public or international outlet that, like those conservative outlets is either not trusted or actively distrusted by the majority of Americans, including independents. In fact, even moderate conservatives trust the BBC, and the do not distrust any public or international outlet other than Al Jeezera. The only outlets trusted by Strong Liberals but distrusted to the level of Beck, et al., are Al Jeezera, Ed Schultz, and Think Progress. The critical difference is that a large % of conservatives not only trust by regularly get their news from Beck et al., whereas those comparably ideological liberal sources not trusted by most people are rarely actually used by even strong liberals compared to more broadly appealing and broadly trusted sources.
What is supported by this data is that these outlets have limited overt strong bias and a variety of views that conservatives could easily choose just like strong liberals choose to outlets with broad appeal and variety of views. However, strong conservatives have no interest in anything neutral, with broad appeal, or a variety of views. So they reject everything but the most ideologically extremist outlets that are actively distrusted by even moderate liberals and in most cases distrusted or at least not trusted by independents.
This is why there are no widely used international outlets that appeal to conservatives. Outlets that tried to be fair and neutral or at least have a variety of partisan views are rejected by strong conservative who only want extremist narrowly conservative views expressed on any outlet they use. Commercially viable or western-government supported outlets obviously need to have this kind of broad appeal that conservatives loath. In addition, the kind of intolerant narrow-minded nationalistic "news" that conservatives like in their US media would obviously be biased toward narrow-minded nationalism of the local people in the outlet's home nation. US conservatives would reject such outlets solely because they are not US-centric, even if at a more fundamental level they shared the values of authoritarian intolerance, inequality, and anti-intellectual religion and corporatism that US conservatives demand and get from all of their most used US outlets. It is the authoritarian intolerance of which nationalism that defines conservative values that makes conservatives reject the BBC as a source of information, while liberals are willing to make use of it. IOW, the BBC is not strongly liberal, it just isn't the kind of extremist US-centric conservatism that conservatives require in their "news" sources. Ironically, the Arab world and Russia have the kind of biased, conservative-values, blindly nationalistic, intolerant of other views media that US conservatives demand. The only problem is that their respective nationalisms motivate them to tell opposing lies in relation to foreign policy issues.
The distrust among strong conservatives of anything that is not overtly and extremely pro-conservative (which is what this data and other studies support) is not surprising because it is really a core defining attribute of social conservatism, where anything outside of a narrow range of their personal preferences is evil, bad, and to be punished. IF you are open to variety and don't support the active suppression of deviance and alternatives, then you aren't a social conservative and would not support most Republican social policy. To their mind "liberal" means not actively hating and attacking anything outside of conservative tastes. ABC is "liberal" because it just reports on gay marriage issues without always decrying it as an assault on civilization. Liberal is not promoting deviance but merely the absence of attack upon it. THis is what the entire "war on Christianity" notion is about. If Christianity is not being shoved down people's throats and if there is any recognition of alternative views, this is construed as an "attack on Christianity".
Apparently for Entertainment News there is more variety for liberals, but in Radio Shows, there is more variety for conservatives.
Wrong again. It isn't some coincidence that conservatives turn to talk radio much more than liberals. Radio shows by particular individual partisans are the epitome of absence of variety. Conservatives prefer their radio shows precisely because they are a single person with a single minded message with no alternative information allowed. ABC has lots of people and varied views. Conservatives are as likely to agree with as many of those views on ABC as liberals are, but conservatives reject such outlets because they do not want any exposure to anything but the most strident conservative opinions. Many efforts to profit off of using the same partisan radio format geared toward liberals, but they have failed as commercial success because far fewer liberals are willing to use such blatantly partisan and purely opinion based (lack of facts) rants as a primary source of news.
