Cable Wars, Fox News vs MSNBC Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Cable Wars, Fox News vs MSNBC - Term Paper Example There are actually facts and history of how media reportage influenced several nationwide actions and decisions, including the infamous civil war in Rwanda, which was believed to have started as an aftermath of a journalist’s submission on air (Schudson, 2002). In the United States and other advanced countries, the kind of media attention and hype given to politicians have said to go a long way in affecting their political carries greatly. A very popular example can be cited with the role the media played in the election of the first Black person to the position of the president of the United States of America, in the person of Barack Obama. Because of the increasingly noticeable influence of the media, there seem to be a continuous urge among most media houses to be the most noted and post popular when it comes to who has the highest following and thus most influential impact on society. This has created what has come to be known as the cable war. History of Cable News In the United States, Cable news refers to television stations that are dedicated purposely for news broadcast (Shen, 2009). Not until the 1980s, not much was known of media houses in the popularization of news broadcast as a full time journalistic business. But from the early 1980s, the pace set by early television stations that became predominantly focused on news broadcast such as Cable News Network (CNN), brought about the term in its most used sense. With time, there became a more centralized approach to cable news when some television stations started narrowing their focus or definition of news. This means that instead of focusing on news as a general term, there became cable news stations that would look into issues like only business or sports as their specialized area of news broadcast (Sparks, 2007). Apart from CNN, which came in 1980, other equally reputable cable news stations or networks followed such as Financial News Network, which came about in 1981, CNN2 in 1982, and CNBC , which was formed in 1989. It was later that other names suffered, that also came to be considered as powerhouses in cable news stations such as Fox News Channel, MSNBC and ESPNews. Among those who would later come to undertake centralized cable news services were Fox Business Network and Bloomberg Television, which focused predominantly on finance, ESPN, which focused on sports, and The Weather Channel, which does weather news. Today, hardly can anyone talk of cable news without mentioning Al Jazeera America. If the history of the development of cable news is anything to go by, one would say that there remains a bright and competitive future for the industry with more faces to surface with time (Ness, 2006). The Concept of Cable War According to media professor Lance Strate, the issue of cable war between Fox News and MSNBC is more of an ideological war rather than a chaotic media war (Schudson, 2002). What this means is that the two media platforms refuse to agree on the same lev el with it comes to most aspects of political and editorial contents. The height of the war or rivalry was however experienced in the build up to the 2012 General Elections between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney. Between Fox News and MSNBC, Robbins (2012) sees what was a deliberate attempt to take opposing and biased stands that seemed to favor one political divide against the other. The same