Rasmussen Reports finds that Fox News viewers prefer McCain; CNN, MSNBC, and network news viewers prefer Obama. Specifically, 87% of Fox viewers say they will vote for McCain, while two thirds of CNN, MSNBC viewers say they will vote for Obama.
The chicken and egg issue comes up here - does favoring McCain cause you to prefer Fox, or vice versa? Does favoring Obama cause you to watch CNN, MSNBC, and the networks, or does watching their biased coverage cause you to prefer Obama?
Warning, science content: this is what we social scientists call a "correlational study." That is, Rasmussen found that folks who like Fox also like McCain while those who dislike Fox also dislike McCain. The problem for all such studies is that they do not answer the causation question, does liking Fox cause liking McCain? In our example above, liking Fox might cause liking McCain, liking McCain might cause liking Fox, or some third factor might cause liking both? In a correlational study there is no way to infer causality. Relatedness, yes, causality, no.
So...we can say that liking McCain is related to watching Fox, and that liking Obama is related to watching CNN, MSNBC, and the nets. My guess: folks watch news programs whose "world view" or Weltanschauung is congruent with their own. The MSM's world view is liberal; many studies have demonstrated that reporters are overwhelmingly registered Democrats.
Fox has carved out a very large cable news viewership catering consciously to folks with a conservative world view. Talk radio mostly serves this same conservative audience. Of the national newspapers, only The Wall Street Journal leans right and it sometimes offends conservatives as with its stance in favor of open borders and the consequence: cheap labor.
