Cable News Doesn't Set Its Own Agenda. Its Competitors Do.
Ask most people why Fox, CNN and MSNBC cover a story the way they do, and the answer they reach for is ideology — Fox leans right, MSNBC leans left, CNN sits in between, and each one covers the news its audience wants. That explanation is not wrong so much as incomplete. In a study published this year in Political Research Quarterly with Valerie Martinez-Ebers and Aida Ramusovic, we looked at something narrower and, I think, more useful: not what each network covers, but how much they cover it, and whether that amount moves in response to what the other two are doing.
We tracked coverage frequency of race stories and COVID stories across all three networks, using media differentiation, delegitimation and journalistic professionalism as the theoretical scaffolding — three different accounts of why a competitive network might raise or lower its own coverage of a story its rivals are already telling. The question underneath all three: does an ideologically branded outlet set its own agenda, or does it take its cues from the competition?
On race coverage, the answer is not the same across networks. Fox is substantially more likely than CNN or MSNBC to increase its coverage frequency of race stories specifically in response to topical coverage by its competitors — when the story is already out there, Fox leans further in. CNN does close to the opposite: its coverage of race stories goes down when Fox's goes up, and MSNBC's coverage moves in a similar direction. That is a genuine divergence, not a rounding error, and it is not the pattern you would predict from ideology alone.
COVID coverage tells a different story entirely. On that topic, all three networks reinforce each other — coverage rises and falls together, with none of the divergence we saw on race. Put the two findings side by side and the real claim comes into focus: outlets branded by ideology are not running an independent agenda that ideology alone explains. What they cover, and how much, depends on the topic and on what the competition is already doing with it.
That is a less satisfying story than "each network just tells its side." It is also, I think, the more accurate one — and it is why we built the study around coverage frequency and competitive response rather than tone or framing, which is where most of this research usually looks first. The full study, News of Converging Crises: Cable Coverage of Race and COVID Stories, is in Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 79, Issue 2.