I’m not arguing about the existence of bias or the numbers of L/R leaning media.

There’s simply more left leaning Americans vs the stance of the Republican Party who’s specifically engineered their message to appeal to voters with more political power. Ex: Losing the popular vote when winning the presidential election only happens to Republicans.

However, simply counting the number of companies leaning left or right doesn’t tell you much. A local newspaper with 5k readers just doesn’t move the needle. Neither does an outlet that’s 0.1% left or right leaning.

So the only accurate measurement is level of lean * number of viewers, and when you do that calculation (as I have) you find the overall media landscape leans Republican.

That makes some sense to me, although the result is surprising. Do have anything you can point to for further reading on the subject?

There’s a few investigations into why Talk Radio became such a Republican dominated market, but I don’t have a good link. They also ignored how NPR fills a similar niche and leans left. But overall I setup a spreadsheet and ran the numbers on viewership vs scores on sites like:

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ Fox: FOX: 6.7, CNN -3.7, another site giving them 4 vs -2 etc.

Then used numbers from sites like https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/first-quarter-2025-cable-new...

So for most watched cable news show you get FOX 4,552k viewers vs CNN 558k viewers. Multiply and you get a rather shockingly different impact.

Yeah, that's an interesting way of looking at it. Also I didn't realize Fox dominates so much.

It makes some sense!