1.5 Opinion and Commentary

Most newspapers contain editorials expressing opinions about the events of the day. The New York Times’s stance is liberal; the Wall Street Journal’s is conservative. They supplement their editorials with opinion columns from regular contributors. A few newspapers add op-eds. These are opinions from people unaffiliated with the paper. Some newspapers carry a range of opinions, others are ideologically monolithic. Cartoons, when the newspaper features them, often comment critically on public officials, policies, and current events. Comic strips are sometimes politically provocative, for example Garry Trudeau’s sardonic Doonesbury and Aaron McGruder’s scathing The Boondocks. These strip writers first published their work in their campus newspapers at Yale and the University of Maryland, respectively.

Magazines provide a spectrum of analysis and opinion, and in some cases a modicum of news. A few appear in print and online; most are only on their websites. Prominent among the liberals and progressives are the Daily Beast, HuffPost, Mother Jones, the Nation, Salon, Slate, Talking Points Memo, and Think Progress. There is also Media Matters, which monitors and corrects what it calls conservative misinformation,

Foremost among the conservative are Breitbart News, the Daily Caller, the Drudge Report, the Federalist, Gateway Pundit, and the National Review. By vehemently promoting Donald Trump they contributed to his election as president in 2016. The president appointed Breitbart’s head, Stephen Bannon, as White House chief strategist, but later fired him.  Some conservative sites are sometimes disparagingly dubbed the ”alt-right,” a term they disavow. An example is the reactionary Alex Jones on radio and the Internet, particularly his incendiary website Infowars. 

The nonpartisan Axios, CQ Roll Call, and the Hill cover government and politics focusing on Washington, DC. Real Clear Politics aggregates political news and polls. The New Republic tends to be politically moderate.

After much debate among members of Congress, televised coverage of floor proceedings via the Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network (C-SPAN) was established in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1979 and in the Senate in 1986 (C-SPAN2) to transmit gavel-to-gavel coverage of floor action. These channels plus C-SPAN3 also air an array of political events, including election debates, political advertisements, press conferences, discussion forums, interviews with news makers, journalists, and authors, and book reviews.

The television networks’ Sunday morning interview programs,  notably Meet the Press (https://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press), Face the Nation (http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/ftn/main3460.shtml), and This Week (http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek), usually feature prominent government officials and other well-known politicians. In the face of sometimes aggressive questioning by the host and interview panelists, guests strive to set the news agenda and get their messages across to viewers. The programs, which have small audiences, are influential because they are widely watched in Washington, DC, otherwise known as “inside the Beltway,” and by people interested in government and politics.

The twenty-four-hour cable television channel CNN reports some news. But it has a lot of time to fill and has cut back on reporters and news-gathering resources, particularly on foreign affairs. It has focused on President Trump, increasingly relying on and reacting to news stories gathered by the major newspapers and organizations such as Politico. It has cut costs and raised profits by surrounding the anchors of its news programs with commentary and opinion, speculation and prediction, from panels consisting of some combination of reporters, correspondents, politicians, former government officials, pundits, political consultants, party strategists, and people from ideological think tanks. These guests, many of whom appear regularly, often express forceful points of view, deploy ”sound bites,” and are adept at memorizing and delivering “spontaneous” observations and quips.

Arguably, CNN is liberal. At least President Trump thinks so, calling it the Clinton News Network. (See the discussion in our Presidency chapter of his relationship with the channel.) Certainly, however, the two other leading cable news channels are essentially ideological. 

For an adamantly pro-Trump, mainly conservative, Republican, anti-Democrat perspective (with the exception of Democrat Donna Brazile), there is Fox News. Despite its claims to separate news from opinion, the two often blend together on behalf of the latter. The channel features partisan, opinionated talk-show hosts, conspicuously the energetic—or bumptious, if you prefer—Sean Hannity, the disputatious Laura Ingraham, and the quizzical Tucker Carlson. 

These commentators use multiple media platforms in addition to the Fox News Channel—radio talk shows, books, and websites—to spread their messages. 

For many years, the channel’s star was the pugilistic populist Bill O’Reilly. He made his show cable television’s most popular public affairs program with over three million viewers nightly, until the New York Times reported that he and Fox had settled five suits against him for sexual harassment or other inappropriate behavior for around $13 million in exchange for the complainants not pursuing litigation or speaking about their accusations. O’Reilly “denied the claims had merit” and hired a crisis communication consultant. But, under pressure from social media, many of his advertisers dropped their sponsorship of his program. He was fired, with a one-year salary payment of approximately $25 million.

MSNBC is cable’s liberal alternative to the conservative Fox News. Its leading hosts, each with their own program, are the combative Chris Hayes, academic Rachel Maddow, voluble Chris Matthews, and the reflectively partisan Lawrence O’Donnell.

Sinclair Broadcasting Group has a hundred and ninety-two local television stations in eighty-nine markets, reaching 39 percent of American viewers. They stations are affiliated with various networks. However, the owner uses them to promote his conservative ideology, to air biased political segments produced by the corporate news division, and for anchors to read from scripts prepared by Sinclair. These messages likely reach many of the approximately twenty million households who rely on local television.

Over two thousand radio stations employ a news-talk format. Hosts have ample time to vent their opinions, to cultivate, reaffirm, and cajole their callers and listeners. The bulk of the talk-radio audience listens to broadcasters who, like themselves, express conservative opinions, are pro-Republican and hostile to liberals, Democrats, and feminists. The most conspicuous is Rush Limbaugh (http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home). This caustic conservative is widely heard (on more than six hundred stations with an estimated weekly audience of around 15 million). He attacks his targets with vigor, often sliding into insult, sneer, and exaggeration.

From a countervailing radical perspective, there is the Pacifica Network, particularly its evening news program Democracy Now! (http://www.democracynow.org), hosted by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez and heard on approximately nine hundred stations. It reports stories and interviews people rarely heard on mainstream, let alone conservative, media.

There are approximately 1,500 Christian programming stations. In addition to their inspirational religious content and music, they broadcast programs on marriage and family issues and advice for the troubled. Some of their content is relevant to politics and public policy, especially their espousal of and support for traditional views and values.

Comedy is a genre that ventures politically where other modes of entertainment are reluctant to tread. Comedy has a point of view, presents an argument, and often lacerates, normally from a liberal, perhaps radical, perspective. President Trump and sometimes his associates, have been the target and more  or less victims, of the television shows of Samantha Bee (Full Frontal), John Oliver (Last Week Tonight), Bill Maher (Real Time), Trevor Noah (The Daily Show), as well as of late night hosts Stephen Colbert and of Seth Meyers, perhaps the most caustic of them all in his post-monologue “A Closer Look”; also segments of Saturday Night Live.

The most irreverent and cogent critique of newspapers appears in The Onion. January 2011 saw the debut on the IFC cable channel of the television version, titled Onion News Network. 

Incivility is common in opinion and commentary. Jeffrey M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj find, however, that the partisan media of talk radio, the Fox and MSNBC cable television channels, and political blogs go way beyond incivility to engage in outrage: that is, rhetoric characterized by “venom, vilification of opponents, and hyperbolic reinterpretations of current events.” There are sensationalism, out of context quotes, and ad hominem attacks. Common are mockery, insulting language, and name calling. The intent is to provoke an emotional response of anger, fear, or moral righteousness. The partisan liberal and conservative media both spew outrage speech, but conservatives are nastier.