***To read the full blog, please check out the complete post on NewsBusters***
During Brian Stelter’s Sunday morning media sermon on CNN’s Reliable Sources, he and his panel of media critics decried what they called ‘negative partisan’ media and blamed it for dividing the country. Sounds pretty accurate, right? But according to them most of the blame for a divided country rested on the shoulders of conservative and right-leaning media outlets.
Stelter began the segment by noting data from the Pew Research Center that showed how “45 percent of Republicans see the Democrats as a threat to the nation's well-being and 41 percent of Democrats view the Republicans a threat.” And he wondered “what’s the relationship between so-called negative partisanship and our daily news consumption?”
His first guest was John Avlon from the left-leaning Daily Beast, who described “negative partisan” media as hatred for others and claimed it was the only thing holding the Republican Party coalition together:
What do libertarian Republicans and the religious right really have in common for example? What it is, they focus on what they hate, what they oppose, the drumbeat that’s hammered home bipartisan media in particular and their politicians. So the only glue holding the coalition together is opposition, not proposition.
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