For a glimpse at the country’s divided political reality, look no further than two television studios on opposite sides of Avenue of the Americas in midtown Manhattan.
From her set inside MSNBC headquarters, Rachel Maddow opened her prime-time coverage of the Trump impeachment hearings by calling the first day’s testimony “a double-barreled problem for the president—triple-barreled, maybe.” President Trump, she said, had been “caught doing something illegal” at the “direct expense of the country’s national interest.”
One block south, from a Fox News studio, Sean Hannity welcomed viewers by declaring “a great day for the United States, for the country, for the president—and a lousy day for the corrupt, do-nothing-for-three-years, radical, extreme, socialist Democrats and their top allies known as the media mob.”
These distinctly different visions—delivered
Increasingly, viewers are flocking to opinionated news outlets with