During a survey held in the U.S. in spring 2023, it was found that adults aged above 45 years were the most likely to say they never watched Fox News, with more than double the share of those aged 45 to 64 years or 65 years or above saying they never tuned into the news channel than adults aged 18 to 29 years. Similarly, ** percent of adults in the latter age bracket watched Fox News weekly, compared to only one percent of adults aged 65 or older.

As of April 2017, ** percent of adults in the United States aged between 55 and 64 years old said that they watched Fox News, making viewers in this age category the cable news channel’s most avid audience. Conversely, younger generations were less likely to say that they watched Fox News.

Fox News’ demographic

In 2018, Fox News’ website was the highest rated online news brand in the United States based on index score, ranking above USA Today, ABC and the New York Times. However, Fox News’ audience is greatly affected by age and as such relies on its older audiences more so than younger viewers. As of August 2018, CNN was the most popular source for TV news among U.S. Millennials, whereas Fox was by far the most preferable among respondents aged 55 or above.

Fox News and trust

Trust in news has become a major topic in recent years, with consumers all over the world encountering fake news stories and even key figures labeling certain content as false in an attempt to smear news publications. A 2018 survey revealed that the majority of U.S. adults said that they believed Fox News was extremely biased, and another study showed that attitudes towards the trustworthiness of Fox News were mixed. Fox News’ credibility has been called into question in recent years, with viewers also scrutinizing Fox’s main competitors CNN and MSNBC as trust, transparency and accuracy become increasingly important to news consumers.

Cable TV news consumption is on the decline. Adults aged between 18 and 34 years old were the least likely to use cable TV networks as a source of news, with a survey held in the United States in August 2022 revealing that 45 percent never did so. Younger consumers preferred social media sites for keeping up to date, and whilst their older peers turned to cable news more frequently, network news was still a more popular daily news source.

Falling cable news ratings

Back in 2017, FOX News, the leading cable news network in the United States, had an average of almost 470 thousand viewers in the primetime demo. With the exception of 2020 where news consumption soared during the COVID-19 pandemic, ratings have fallen consecutively each year, and by 2022, FOX’s average viewer count sank to 341 thousand. CNN and MSNBC saw even greater drops in their audiences, with the latter seeing its ratings fall by more than 2.5 times between 2017 and 2022.

Why the drop in ratings?

Cable and satellite TV is no longer the norm: only adults aged 60 or above express a preference for traditional TV over video streaming services and apps, and among certain age groups the share who preferred the latter was over 70 percent. Indeed, a 2022 survey found that the majority of Gen Z, millennials, and Gen X did not have a cable subscription. The main reason for cutting the cord was price, with over a third of adults saying that cable was simply too expensive.

This statistic illustrates the share of Fox News TV viewers in the United States as of 2018. The results were sorted by age. In 2018, ***** percent of respondents aged 18 to 29 years stated they watch Fox News. The Statista Global Consumer Survey offers a global perspective on consumption and media usage, covering the offline und online world of the consumer.

The statistic shows the share of consumers who watch Fox News in the United States as of April 2017, sorted by gender. During the survey, 56 percent of male respondents stated that they watched the cable news channel.

A survey held in the U.S. in spring 2023 found that ** percent of white adults rarely or never watched Fox News, and the figure was similar for Black respondents. Hispanic Americans were the most engaged with the news channel, with over ** percent watching Fox News at least weekly.

What are the most-watched news networks? In November 2023, Fox News was the most watched cable news network in the United States and continues to do well in terms of its primetime audience, with **** million primetime viewers in that period. Fox News viewers in the 25-54 demographic amounted to *** thousand, whilst MSNBC had just *** thousand. When looking at Fox News viewers compared to CNN, the overall average number of primetime viewers was notably different. CNN has been losing viewers in recent years, although during the coronavirus outbreak, tended to pull in a larger audience than usual. Which cable news channel has the most viewers in prime time? Performing well during the mid-evening prime time slot on cable television is the goal of any network that takes its ratings seriously.Cable news networks like Fox, CNN, and MSNBC are engaged in a monthly battle to hit the top spot during primetime and grab the highest cable news ratings during those precious evening hours. Fox News ratings during primetime are generally higher than its two direct competitors, and was the top channel for watching the State of the Union Address in 2020. What is prime time TV? Primetime television is the time at which the audience peaks, and in the United States usually takes place between 8pm and 11pm. TV networks show their most sought after or successful programs during this time, and this slot is where advertisers like to spend their money in order to maximize the number of viewers who will see their products. In fact, many of the most-watched news shows like Hannity or The Rachel Maddow Show which debate news coverage from a particular point of view, draw in massive audiences each month, ultimately contributing to the overall ratings of the network they belong to.

A survey held in the U.S. in spring 2023 found that ** percent of Republicans watched Fox News every day or a few times per week, compared to only ** percent of Democrats. More than a third of Democrats and Independents never engaged with Fox News, along with ** percent of Republicans, highlighting the ongoing struggle cable networks face in keeping viewer numbers up.

Overview
The Controllable Multimodal Feedback Synthesis (CMFeed) Dataset is designed to enable the generation of sentiment-controlled feedback from multimodal inputs, including text and images. This dataset can be used to train feedback synthesis models in both uncontrolled and sentiment-controlled manners. Serving a crucial role in advancing research, the CMFeed dataset supports the development of human-like feedback synthesis, a novel task defined by the dataset's authors. Additionally, the corresponding feedback synthesis models and benchmark results are presented in the associated code and research publication.

Task Uniqueness: The task of controllable multimodal feedback synthesis is unique, distinct from LLMs and tasks like VisDial, and not addressed by multi-modal LLMs. LLMs often exhibit errors and hallucinations, as evidenced by their auto-regressive and black-box nature, which can obscure the influence of different modalities on the generated responses [Ref1; Ref2]. Our approach includes an interpretability mechanism, as detailed in the supplementary material of the corresponding research publication, demonstrating how metadata and multimodal features shape responses and learn sentiments. This controllability and interpretability aim to inspire new methodologies in related fields.

Data Collection and Annotation
Data was collected by crawling Facebook posts from major news outlets, adhering to ethical and legal standards. The comments were annotated using four sentiment analysis models: FLAIR, SentimentR, RoBERTa, and DistilBERT. Facebook was chosen for dataset construction because of the following factors:
• Facebook was chosen for data collection because it uniquely provides metadata such as news article link, post shares, post reaction, comment like, comment rank, comment reaction rank, and relevance scores, not available on other platforms.
• Facebook is the most used social media platform, with 3.07 billion monthly users, compared to 550 million Twitter and 500 million Reddit users. [Ref]
• Facebook is popular across all age groups (18-29, 30-49, 50-64, 65+), with at least 58% usage, compared to 6% for Twitter and 3% for Reddit. [Ref]. Trends are similar for gender, race, ethnicity, income, education, community, and political affiliation [Ref]
• The male-to-female user ratio on Facebook is 56.3% to 43.7%; on Twitter, it's 66.72% to 23.28%; Reddit does not report this data. [Ref]

Filtering Process: To ensure high-quality and reliable data, the dataset underwent two levels of filtering:
a) Model Agreement Filtering: Retained only comments where at least three out of the four models agreed on the sentiment.
b) Probability Range Safety Margin: Comments with a sentiment probability between 0.49 and 0.51, indicating low confidence in sentiment classification, were excluded.
After filtering, 4,512 samples were marked as XX. Though these samples have been released for the reader's understanding, they were not used in training the feedback synthesis model proposed in the corresponding research paper.

Dataset Description
• Total Samples: 61,734
• Total Samples Annotated: 57,222 after filtering.
• Total Posts: 3,646
• Average Likes per Post: 65.1
• Average Likes per Comment: 10.5
• Average Length of News Text: 655 words
• Average Number of Images per Post: 3.7

Components of the Dataset
The dataset comprises two main components:
• CMFeed.csv File: Contains metadata, comment, and reaction details related to each post.
• Images Folder: Contains folders with images corresponding to each post.

Data Format and Fields of the CSV File
The dataset is structured in CMFeed.csv file along with corresponding images in related folders. This CSV file includes the following fields:
• Id: Unique identifier
• Post: The heading of the news article.
• News_text: The text of the news article.
• News_link: URL link to the original news article.
• News_Images: A path to the folder containing images related to the post.
• Post_shares: Number of times the post has been shared.
• Post_reaction: A JSON object capturing reactions (like, love, etc.) to the post and their counts.
• Comment: Text of the user comment.
• Comment_like: Number of likes on the comment.
• Comment_reaction_rank: A JSON object detailing the type and count of reactions the comment received.
• Comment_link: URL link to the original comment on Facebook.
• Comment_rank: Rank of the comment based on engagement and relevance.
• Score: Sentiment score computed based on the consensus of sentiment analysis models.
• Agreement: Indicates the consensus level among the sentiment models, ranging from -4 (all negative) to 4 (all positive). 3 negative and 1 positive will result into -2 and 3 positives and 1 negative will result into +2.
• Sentiment_class: Categorizes the sentiment of the comment into 1 (positive) or 0 (negative).

More Considerations During Dataset Construction
We thoroughly considered issues such as the choice of social media platform for data collection, bias and generalizability of the data, selection of news handles/websites, ethical protocols, privacy and potential misuse before beginning data collection. While achieving completely unbiased and fair data is unattainable, we endeavored to minimize biases and ensure as much generalizability as possible. Building on these considerations, we made the following decisions about data sources and handling to ensure the integrity and utility of the dataset:

• Why not merge data from different social media platforms? We chose not to merge data from platforms such as Reddit and Twitter with Facebook due to the lack of comprehensive metadata, clear ethical guidelines, and control mechanisms—such as who can comment and whether users' anonymity is maintained—on these platforms other than Facebook. These factors are critical for our analysis. Our focus on Facebook alone was crucial to ensure consistency in data quality and format.

• Choice of four news handles: We selected four news handles—BBC News, Sky News, Fox News, and NY Daily News—to ensure diversity and comprehensive regional coverage. These news outlets were chosen for their distinct regional focuses and editorial perspectives: BBC News is known for its global coverage with a centrist view, Sky News offers geographically targeted and politically varied content learning center/right in the UK/EU/US, Fox News is recognized for its right-leaning content in the US, and NY Daily News provides left-leaning coverage in New York. Many other news handles such as NDTV, The Hindu, Xinhua, and SCMP are also large-scale but may contain information in regional languages such as Indian and Chinese, hence, they have not been selected. This selection ensures a broad spectrum of political discourse and audience engagement.

• Dataset Generalizability and Bias: With 3.07 billion of the total 5 billion social media users, the extensive user base of Facebook, reflective of broader social media engagement patterns, ensures that the insights gained are applicable across various platforms, reducing bias and strengthening the generalizability of our findings. Additionally, the geographic and political diversity of these news sources, ranging from local (NY Daily News) to international (BBC News), and spanning political spectra from left (NY Daily News) to right (Fox News), ensures a balanced representation of global and political viewpoints in our dataset. This approach not only mitigates regional and ideological biases but also enriches the dataset with a wide array of perspectives, further solidifying the robustness and applicability of our research.

• Dataset size and diversity: Facebook prohibits the automatic scraping of its users' personal data. In compliance with this policy, we manually scraped publicly available data. This labor-intensive process requiring around 800 hours of manual effort, limited our data volume but allowed for precise selection. We followed ethical protocols for scraping Facebook data , selecting 1000 posts from each of the four news handles to enhance diversity and reduce bias. Initially, 4000 posts were collected; after preprocessing (detailed in Section 3.1), 3646 posts remained. We then processed all associated comments, resulting in a total of 61734 comments. This manual method ensures adherence to Facebook’s policies and the integrity of our dataset.

Ethical considerations, data privacy and misuse prevention
The data collection adheres to Facebook’s ethical guidelines [<a href="https://developers.facebook.com/terms/"

In 2024, the leading cable news network in the United States was Fox News. The network had an average of *** thousand primetime viewers in the primetime demo (adults aged 25 to 54 years old) in that year, once again outperforming MSNBC and CNN by a significant margin. That said, 2023 marked the first time Fox News saw its ratings fall below *******, higher ratings in 2024 can in large part be explained by the election cycle.

In 2024, NBC had ******* average viewers, making it the leading ad-supported TV network in the United States among adults in the********* demographic group. CBS ranked second, with ******* average viewers, followed by ABC with ******* average viewers. Best performing TV networks in the U.S. among total viewers The extent of NBC’s success in 2023 is even clearer when considering the vast difference between NBC and the networks ranking in third and fourth place among total viewers. Fox had **** million, meaning that NBC had over *********** more average viewers than *** of its close competitors. Interestingly, although Fox ranked fourth among the leading ad supported U.S. networks, only ***** of Fox’s shows secured places in the top ten most watched shows of 2023. Top cable news networks in the U.S. TV shows aside, some of the highest performing cable networks are those which specialize in news. This is where Fox tends to excel, regularly pulling in over *********** primetime viewers each month. Other cable news networks competing with Fox include MSNBC which tends to rank second, followed by CNN.

A survey conducted in the United States in April 2023 found that 12 percent of respondents had a lot of trust in Fox News, whereas 23 percent said that they did not trust the news channel at all. Trust in news can vary according to the respondent's political leaning, age, educational background, and several other factors such as profession, ethnicity, and voting behavior.

Day four of the 2024 Republican National Convention was watched by over 25 million Americans, significantly up from the previous days. Older age groups were the most likely to tune in, with around 18.4 million people aged 55 years and older watching the final night when Donald Trump was accepted for the presidential nomination.

The leading ad-supported cable network in the United States in 2024 ranked by number of viewers was FOX News, with about *** million viewers in the presented period. Ranking second and third respectively were ESPN and MSNBC, followed by TBS which averaged around ******* viewers.

In 2024, CBS was the leading ad-supported television network in the United States, with an average viewership of **** million, surpassing the viewership number of NBC. The latter recorded **** people watching the TV channel. Spotlight on CBS CBS is among the oldest and most popular commercial broadcast television and radio networks in the United States. Founded in 1927, the company now operates as a subsidiary of Paramount, with all of its original programming available on the Paramount+ streaming platform. A closer look at the network's recent performance reveals that it ranked fourth among the leading television networks among U.S. adults in 2023. CBS reported an average of *** thousand viewers between the ages of 18 to 49 that year and was only outperformed by NBC, Fox, and ABC. So what are audiences watching? Popular television shows According to the latest data, NFL Sunday Night Football was the most watched TV program in the United States during the ********* season. The sports broadcast, which aired on NBC, scored a respective ***** million viewers during that period. The three most popular fictional programs to make it into the top five were "Yellowstone", "NCIS," and "FBI" broadcast on Paramount Network and CBS.

In a survey held in April 2023, 13 percent of Americans said that they found CNN to be a very trustworthy source of news and information. Opinions regarding the network’s trustworthiness varied, with 21 percent of respondents saying that they did not trust CNN at all.

CNN

CNN is a pay television channel founded in the 1980s, and is currently owned by AT&T. It is one of the most popular news networks in the U.S. and has spawned successful affiliate networks around the world. Survey responses to attitudes about the credibility of CNN found that 50 percent of all participating adults deemed CNN to be very or somewhat credible, though opinions differed among certain groups. The station is viewed by some as more liberal-leaning in terms of political spin, and as such political affiliation affected respondents' feelings about the channel. Age, educational background, ethnicity, and multiple other factors also influenced attitudes to CNN's credibility, as is the case with competing channels such as MSNBC and Fox News.

Fake news

The credibility of news sources is of growing importance to consumers as more and more news audiences are faced with fake news, which is an ongoing issue not only in the United States but also in other countries around the world. Fake news puts the public at risk of digesting deliberately untrue or inaccurate information about major happenings and events. News consumers are increasingly concerned about the spread and influence of fake news, so much so that the share of adults who would support government intervention in restricting false information grew by nine percent between 2018 and 2021.