In a divided media landscape, C-SPAN draws almost perfectly balanced audience

Jan 1, 2026

The 2025 Magid survey aligns with earlier studies revealing that C-SPAN’s viewers have historically represented a balanced mix of conservatives, liberals, and moderates

A new fall 2025 Magid Research report shows that C-SPAN draws an almost perfectly balanced audience across political ideologies. According to Magid, among the 90 million Americans who are active C-SPAN users (engaged across platforms in the past six months) 28% of viewers identify as conservative, 27% as liberal or progressive, and 41% as moderate. The data also shows cross-viewing across parties — Republicans watch Democrats, Democrats watch Republicans, and moderates watch all sides — reinforcing C-SPAN’s unique standing as a neutral platform trusted across the political spectrum.

A Pew survey earlier this year reported that viewers of every other national television news outlet are significantly weighted toward either the conservative or liberal end of the political spectrum.

The 2025 Magid survey figures fit into a decades-long pattern: C-SPAN has consistently drawn a large, civically engaged, and ideologically balanced audience in ways that are remarkably stable over time. The Pew Research Center in 2004, Hart Research in 2014, and Ipsos research studies in 2021 and 2023 each found that C-SPAN's viewers represented a balanced mix of liberals, conservatives, and moderates, aligning closely with the current Magid findings and mirroring the broader ideological makeup of the country. At a time when Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, and liberals have sorted themselves into media environments of largely like-minded thinkers, C-SPAN stands out as a rare exception: a place where conservatives and liberals watch in similar numbers. In today’s polarized media environment, such balance is increasingly rare.

C-SPAN continues to serve as a nonpartisan public space where Americans across ideologies follow the workings of their government. For 46 years, the network has operated as a nonprofit, privately funded organization with no government support, offering the public direct, unfiltered access to federal proceedings. The 2025 Magid results, reinforced by decades of research, underscore C-SPAN’s enduring mission of neutrality, transparency, and open access to government—and the lasting trust viewers place in that commitment.

Magid is a leading consumer intelligence and business solutions firm that uncovers what drives human behavior and translates those insights into predictive, actionable strategies for clients. This survey was conducted among a census-representative sample of 2,000 U.S. adults.

C-SPAN, the private nonprofit public affairs media organization providing Americans with unfiltered access to government proceedings, was created in 1979 as a public service by the cable TV industry and is primarily funded through fees paid by cable and satellite TV companies that provide the C-SPAN Networks to subscribers. C-SPAN connects with millions of Americans through its three commercial free TV networks, C-SPAN Radio, C-SPAN podcasts, the C-SPAN Now app, a new connected-TV streaming app C-SPAN Select, C-SPAN.org and various social media platforms. The C-SPAN Networks’ video-rich website contains over 300,000 hours of searchable and shareable content.