![]() While most Fox viewers are Republican, a sizable minority aren't, and they're particularly suggestible to the channel's influence. “Fox is substantially better at influencing Democrats than MSNBC is at influencing Republicans," the authors find. Watching three minutes more of Fox News per week in 2008 would have made the typical Democratic or centrist voter 1 percentage point likelier to vote Republican that year. But Fox News increases Republican voting odds for centrists, for Democratic viewers, and even, in 20, for Republicans already strongly inclined to vote that way. ![]() The effects of CNN and MSNBC on centrist voters are mostly negligible MSNBC, in 20, modestly increased odds of voting Republican, before it turned left in time for 2008. You can see Fox News growing more conservative and MSNBC starting its move to the left with Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and others in the late 2000s: Martin and Yurukoglu 2017 Martin and Yurukoglu integrated a vast array of data - on Fox's channel position and viewership, individual/zip code/county level presidential voting behavior, and transcripts of cable news shows to showcase their ideology - into an extensive model that they can then use to estimate how effective Fox (and CNN and MSNBC) is at persuading viewers to vote its way.īelow, for instance, is how the estimated ideological stance of each channel changed over time a lower score means more liberal, and a higher score means more conservative. "I personally don't think it's totally implausible, but it is higher than I would have guessed prior to the research." And even if the effect were half as large as estimated, that’d still mean that Fox News is having a very real, sizable effect on elections. "There is a non-trivial amount of uncertainty" about those estimates, Yurukoglu cautions. They estimate that if Fox News hadn't existed, the Republican presidential candidate’s share of the two-party vote would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008.įor context, that would've made John Kerry the 2004 popular vote winner, and turned Barack Obama's 2008 victory into a landslide where he got 60 percent of the two-party vote. Emory University political scientist Gregory Martin and Stanford economist Ali Yurukoglu estimate that watching Fox News directly causes a substantial rightward shift in viewers’ attitudes, which translates into a significantly greater willingness to vote for Republican candidates. ![]() ![]() Given that Fox was founded by a longtime Republican Party operative and has almost exclusively hired conservative commentators, talk radio hosts, and the like to host its shows, it would stand to reason that its dominance on basic cable could influence how Americans vote, perhaps even tipping elections.Ī new study in the American Economic Review (the discipline’s flagship journal), with an intriguing and persuasive methodology, finds exactly that. Fox News is, by far, America’s dominant TV news channel in the second quarter of 2017, Fox posted 2.35 million total viewers in primetime versus 1.64 million for MSNBC and 1.06 million for CNN. ![]()
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