A study from the University of Pennsylvania recently concluded cable news is more polarized now than it was 10 years ago, and Dan Abrams of NewsNation says he’s seen that first hand.
In an interview with MediaVillage‘s News On-The-Record, Abrams said he has experienced first hand the polarization described in the study.
“My frustration is that you’re on one team or the other,” the Dan Abrams Live host said. “I am constantly accused of being dishonest, wrong, or portrayed as a villain by one side or the other because they only watch one segment. They’ll watch one segment where I will say something that that person disagrees with. ‘What happened to Dan Abrams?! He’s become crazy. He’s become this,’ and it’s hard to get people to put everything into context and look at the totality and see I’m trying to look at things issue by issue and that’s not the business model that has typically worked on cable news.”
Abrams pointed to a recent show where he disagreed with students at George Washington University for refusing to take a constitutional law class taught by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in one segment, while then criticizing the Attorney General of Indiana for trying to find information for possible criminal charges of a doctor who performed an abortion on a 10-year-old rape victim in another.
“I don’t view that as radical. I view that as probably where most of the country is on a lot of this stuff. But in the cable news world, there isn’t a home for those views that don’t necessarily align. You’d expect to see the Clarence Thomas segment on Fox (News) and you’d expect to see the abortion doctor on segment on MSNBC and not the other.”
