President Biden on Wednesday bemoaned the partisan divide currently playing out on cable news channels across the country and predicted a drop in ratings in the coming years.
“One of the things I find fascinating is happening, and you all deal with it every day and it will impact on how things move, is that a lot of the speculation and the polling data shows that the cables are heading south,” Biden said during a press conference from the White House. “They’re losing viewership.”
Biden called out Fox News specifically, saying the conservative news network was “okay for awhile but it’s not granted and a lot of the rest are predicted to be not in the mix in the next four or five years.”
Biden added that many cable news viewers have “put themselves in certain alleys” and observed that the vast majority of the media-consuming public seeks out news sources that reaffirm their political worldviews.
“Again, I’m no expert in any of this but I think you have to acknowledge is what gets covered now is necessarily a little bit different than what gets covered in the past,” Biden told reporters during the briefing. “And it’s changed because of from everything from a thing called the internet. It’s changed because the way in which we have self-identified perspectives what channel you turn on, what network, what cable you look at. It’s never quite been like that.”
Fox News, which features primetime opinion hosts who routinely attack Biden and his policies, typically dominate the cable news ratings landscape. Recent data from Per Nielsen MRI Fusion also shows more Democrats are watching Fox News during prime time than CNN.
Each of the three major cable news companies, Fox, CNN and MSNBC have poured millions of dollars in recent years into bolstering their streaming services as more Americans cut cable television out of their budgets.
Earlier during his lengthy press conference on Wednesday, Biden took a question from Fox White House correspondent Peter Doocy, who he has sparred with before, who asked the president why he was pulling the country “so far to the left. Biden dismissed the question, saying he’s not a socialist.
Later in the press conference, a reporter from Newsmax, a small right-leaning network, asked the president about a poll indicating some voters believing he is mentally unfit for office.