New Delhi: Fox News attacks other American news outlets roughly once every 14.5 minutes, compared with once every 140 minutes on CNN and every 61 minutes on MSNBC, according to a study published by the Nieman Journalism Lab.
The study suggests that one factor behind declining trust in journalism may be the amount of time news outlets spend disparaging other media organisations.
A research team at Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy recently completed a study examining the prevalence of “inter-journalism disparagement” across the three major US cable news networks – Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC.
“The results were stark. Fox News far exceeds the other networks, with inter-journalism disparagement taking place once every 14.5 minutes. In contrast, CNN engages in inter-journalism disparagement roughly every 140 minutes, and MSNBC every 61 minutes,” the study said.
How the study tracked media attacks
The research team collected 15 years of cable news transcripts, covering 2011 to 2025, from the three news networks.
The dataset comprised 3,543 transcripts containing nearly 19 million words across the three networks, equivalent to roughly 62,000 pages of text.
Given the volume of material, the researchers trained OpenAI’s GPT model to identify attacks against the news media. They developed a 20-page instruction document to guide the model in identifying and classifying such instances.
The study defined “inter-journalism disparagement” as “negative statements about the conduct or content of an explicitly identified journalism target”.
What counts as disparagement?
The researchers identified criticism directed at both journalism as a whole and specific news organisations.
CNN’s Dan Pfeiffer, for instance, described political journalism broadly as bad, problematic and failing massively, according to the study.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow described The Washington Post’s editorial page as “rabid and foaming” and “super right-wing”, adding, “I can’t believe this is in this real newspaper.”
“What we found when comparing the three networks tells us a lot about the dynamics of contemporary cable news and partisan journalism,” the study said.
According to the study, disparaging journalism is a far more central part of Fox News programming than it is of CNN or MSNBC.
Edited by Maryam Hassan