The Fox News Advantage: How Cable News Divides Along Religious and Generational Lines

Young atheists and agnostics aren't tuning into MSNBC while young Christians still watch Fox News

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I think that I’m a lot like the folks who read this newsletter - I don’t actually watch the news that much anymore. I used to be a regular viewer of our local news station that is based close to Carbondale and covers our county, but then they literally fired all of their meteorologists and outsourced that part of the broadcast to some command center in Atlanta or some such place. That annoyed me to no end. So, I stopped watching it altogether now. Yes, you can conjure the Grandpa Simpson meme “Old Man Yells at Cloud“ right now.

But I rarely watch the nightly news on a major broadcast network and I bet I may consume an hour of the 24-hour news channels (CNN, Fox, MSNBC) in an average month. I just don’t feel the need to watch the news anymore. Sometimes when there’s a breaking news story, I will throw it on while I doom scroll social media, but that doesn’t happen too much. I do watch 60 Minutes and CBS Sunday Morning (which is probably my favorite journalistic program). However, that’s the extent of my viewership habits.

What prompted that little discourse about my media consumption habits is a series of questions that the Cooperative Election Study began asking in 2020 about television network news. It’s a pretty simple setup: in the past 24 hours, which of these networks did you watch? And it’s got all the major broadcast news stations (ABC, CBS, NBC) but then it has the three 24-hour news channels along with PBS and then an “other” option. People can check all that apply.

This is the share who checked the box for each of those news outlets in the 2020, 2022, and 2024 datasets.

I wanted to start with this analysis to see how much “bounciness” there is in these numbers. When I first looked at these questions, I really thought that answers would be all over the board and there wouldn’t be a whole lot of reliability to be had, but after looking at the graph I think that this data is actually pretty trustworthy, really. The variations from year to year are basically what one would expect - no big shifts, but a little bit of movement here and there.

For instance, the share of folks who are watching NBC News is basically 33-35% of the country. That passes the sniff test, I suppose. The numbers for ABC are just a bit higher but don’t change that much either (36-38%). There’s just not much numeric change from one survey to another and there’s really no rhyme or reason to any change. It’s not like viewership consistently slid between 2020 and 2024.

There is one outlier, though - it’s CNN. In the 2020 data, about 39% of the sample said that they had watched the news network in the prior 24 hours. That dropped to 35% in the 2022 and 2024 data. So, I think we can say that CNN has slipped just a bit over time. That’s not necessarily the case for any of the others.

Now, let me show you media consumption in 2024 by generation of the respondent - this one is really fun.

There are a couple of things that really jump out to me in this one. First, it’s the absolute dominance of Fox News with nearly every age group. Obviously they are crushing it with old folks. About 55% of the Silent Generation and 44% of Boomers watch Fox News every single day. But they are also doing some big numbers with younger adults, too. I mean, the data indicates that a majority of Gen Z are watching Fox News! Look how MSNBC fares compared to this - very low. Which tracks well with Nielsen ratings data, for what it’s worth.

I do need to point out that network news consumption does rise among younger adults for a bunch of networks though - you can see it for ABC, CBS, and NBC. The jumps are modest, but they are clearly ticking upwards. However, look at that rise for CNN. Among Boomers, just a quarter are watching Anderson Cooper and company on a daily basis. For Gen Z, it’s their favorite network (just barely ahead of Fox News). In contrast, MSNBC does worse with Gen Z than with Millennials or Gen X.

But we haven’t discussed religion yet, so you know we need to get to that.

The color coding helps a lot here to get a quick sense of what news people like to consume and which ones they avoid. No one really watches a whole lot of PBS, honestly. Especially white evangelicals. But no large group is much above 15%. Although Buddhists are a fun outlier there.

When it comes to network news, I just don’t see a really strong discernible pattern. One thing that does jump out is that Black Protestants are more likely to watch ABC, CBS, or NBC compared to other Christian groups. But I just don’t think we can make big claims about Catholics vs. Protestants here. Those networks are in the 30-40% range across the board.

But the Fox News vs. MSNBC divide is on full display in this visualization. Among white evangelicals, 20% watch MSNBC and 62% watch Fox News - a gap of 42 percentage points. For non-white evangelicals, the gap is a single point. You can basically overlay political ideology on top of these two columns and it all makes a lot of sense: right-leaning groups prefer Fox News, those on the left are partial to MSNBC. I will come back to that in a minute.

How about changes in viewership habits over time? I calculated the share who watched each option in 2020 and then in 2024. A positive number indicates increased viewership.

This is why I think this data is pretty good - there aren’t a whole lot of big swings from these two surveys. In many of the cells, the overall change in percentage is pretty modest - less than five points in many cases. You can see that among the network news options the most. Some modest gains for ABC and CBS, but people are just not changing their viewing habits a whole lot from one election cycle to another. Which makes sense in my mind.

I do see a whole lot of negative numbers in that CNN column, though. Outside of the Latter-day Saints, CNN saw big losses across the entire religious spectrum. Among agnostics, viewers were down by nearly 7 percentage points. They were down about the same share with Jews. And there were big drops for Protestants and Catholics, too. Just a really bad result for CNN.

But let me revisit that whole “Fox News vs. MSNBC” debate now. I think it’s important to see just how big the media divide is among many of these religious groups.

The groups at the top of the graph are those that favor Fox News and it’s the usual suspects up top there. Among white evangelicals, Fox News has a 49-point advantage. That’s the biggest divide (in either direction) of any religious group. The group that follows white evangelicals are Orthodox Christians at +32 for Fox News, white Catholics at +29, and they are followed by Mormons at +27. Then a bunch of groups that are in the 10-16 point range like mainline Protestants and non-white evangelicals.

There are only five religious groups that are more inclined to watch MSNBC. Atheists lead this category at +32 for MSNBC, followed by agnostics at +21 and Black Protestants at +14. However, I do need to point out that none of these groups at the bottom of the graph are that large. They combine for about 20% of the entire population of the United States. Evangelicals, by themselves, are that large.

I mean, there’s a reason that Fox News has 13 of the 15 most watched news programs in the United States.

But I wanted to bring age back into the conversation just a little bit and there’s a reason for that. According to Nielsen, the average watcher of Fox News and MSNBC is about 65 years old. Is there any evidence that Fox is going to find a new tranche of viewers from young white evangelicals?

I love this graph because it shows how polarized media viewing is among older Americans. I mean, look at those from the Silent Generation. If they are Christians, they prefer Fox News. If they are non-religious, they favor MSNBC. It’s as clear as possible. You can also see that among Boomers, too. That same divide is there: Christians watch Fox, the nones watch MSNBC. But then that trend begins to break down a bit with Gen X and then really starts to collapse among Millennials.

To me, the most telling part of this graph is the atheist/agnostic Millennials. They do favor MSNBC over Fox News but only by a small margin (13-14%). Compare that to Boomer atheists/agnostics when those numbers were 46% and 30% respectively. That’s also clearly the case with Gen Z atheists/agnostics. They just don’t watch MSNBC that much at all - their margin drops into the single digits. Meanwhile for younger Christians, they are still lapping up Fox News programming.

If I were an executive at MSNBC (recently rebranded to MS Now), this would terrify me. Who is the most likely person to watch Chris Hayes or Rachel Maddow’s replacement in 15 years? It would be young atheists/agnostics. They just aren’t showing up in big numbers in this data. Young nones aren’t going to buoy the liberal networks going forward. However, Fox News seems like it will be doing just fine for decades to come.

Of course, I think we can all say that networks, whether ABC, PBS, CNN or Fox News don’t seem like they matter as much as they did 20 years ago with the rise of social media. But don’t expect them to go away any time soon. But when Boomers exit the stage, the relevance of those night-time talking heads may just go with them.

Code for this post can be found here.

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Ryan P. Burge is a professor of practice at the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University.