Over the past four years, as political tensions are more prevalent, it is now easy to point out what cable networks favor who. The decades of rivalry between Fox News and CNN is nothing new, the competition between these two channels have been heating up to new levels which now includes MSNBC.

To get the full scope of how all this came to be, it’s best to look back in brief at history. As CNN was established in the 1980’s it had a clear purpose of presenting news free of political bias. They had been well known for their on-the-scene reporting during major conflicts and being the nations “Breaking News” channel for their coverage of major world events.

Although CNN cherished the reputation of being free of political bias with their reporting, it gradually bumped them behind in the ratings column with Fox and MSNBC. These two networks may be on different sides of the aisle, but they both aren’t the traditional partisan free news reporting.

As Fox was founded in 1996, it steadily climbed its way up in the ratings and has held the top spot for nearly two decades. The main difference from that of CNN, Fox had a strength in opinion journalism and ran more of a talk-show than news on most of their programs. That twist of providing conservative coverage led Fox to stand out from the rest of other cable news.

With these two networks leading the charge on cable TV, it became apparent that viewers began taking new turns with how they receive traditional news. That being with the rise of social media and more options online to receive news faster, watching CNN just became plainly boring to watch. That became more clear when CNN slumped third in the ratings in 2010-2012. Fox had continued to rise in the ratings despite being the voice of opposition when Obama was in Office.

In realization, CNN had begun to turn course from presenting in a traditional news format to providing more punditry and political coverage like that of Fox. This can be perfectly seen from the 2016 election. Fox had clearly positioned themselves with the views of Trump on their programming per usual but CNN had aligned themselves on the opposite spectrum.

This sparked an all-out war between which side is credible, and if tuning in ever so often, these two networks began bashing each other over what information was accurate or not. This new course of reporting for CNN boosted their ratings in second after Fox, especially after Trump’s upset win. Both networks were on constant analysis of criticizing either party while detecting a smaller time to provide plain old breaking news.

With a shift in the political spectrum after the 2020 election, smaller conservative outlets like Newsmax and OAN(One News Network) are now threatening the credibility of Fox to its conservative audience thanks in hand to Trump’s defiant tweets promoting those smaller outlets questioning the integrity of the recent election.

As for CNN, it appears they received a huge boost from being highly critical of the Trump administrations every move. With Trump sort of fading out of the spotlight, it’s unclear how long these boost in ratings for both networks will last and their futures hold for their audiences.