The first public impeachment hearings on President Donald Trump’s alleged illegally pressuring of Ukraine’s President Zelensky to investigate his political rival former Vice President Joe Biden began this morning in Washington D.C. It is known as the Ukraine scandal. The impeachment proceeding is the first step by Democrats to try to remove President Trump from office.
Public opinion is divided along party lines in almost any current political discussion and the impeachment hearings are no different. The influence of which media outlets audiences get their news from is a major factor.
The House Intelligence Committee heard testimony from the current U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, William B. Taylor Jr. and Congressman Devin Nunes to help determine if President Trump was involved in the illegal activity connected to the Ukraine sandal.
With the rise of cable news and the internet, the media has covered this impeachment hearing differently than previous ones for former president’s Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon.
“When we had three national news channels CBS, ABC and NBC…. we had one set of facts. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, not their own facts,” says journalism professor of professional practice at USC Annenberg, Gabriel Kahn.
Director of the Center for the Political Future at USC Dornsife, Robert Shrum says that social media is another element that has deepened the political divide. “We have so much more media, such a variety of media as compared to the Nixon hearings. Twitter alone is like its own independent channel with hundreds of thousands of people tweeting in real time,” Shrum says.
Kahn’s opinion is that the current partisan news model failed to examine Congressman Nunes opening statement today before the House Intelligence Committee based on the facts. “Cable news is a very effective way of collecting advertising revenue, because audiences can be micro targeted based on their opinions and views,” said Kahn.
“It is really a business incentive that drove Fox news to stake out its claim on the right and subsequently later MSNBC to think that they should own the left side of the spectrum,” Kahn said. He encourages audiences to seek out professionally produced journalism that is vetted for facts as opposed to “ideological comfort food.”
Shrum has a different opinion based on news he saw and read of today’s hearing. “I think the media has mostly played this [the impeachment hearing] pretty straight. They have reported the facts,” said Shrum.
Deputy director of rapid response at Media Matters for America, Andrew Lawrence has noticed a trend while monitoring cable news. While Lawrence’s job is to aggregate data on broadcast news trends at night, primarily Fox News, he has noticed that different channels have prioritized different aspects of the impeachment hearing. “Fox News tends to criticize the process of impeachment, while MSNBC is concerned with the background to impeachment and allegations of bribery in the Ukraine scandal,” Lawrence said.
Media Matters for America is a Washington D.C. based organization that has a liberal bias and primarily focuses on misinformation in conservative media Lawrence said.