A study in which viewers of the ultra-conservative US broadcaster Fox News were paid to watch CNN sheds light on the influence of the media on people’s views.
Fox News viewers often live in a universe of their own: the ultra-conservative US network tells them that a conspiracy of foreign powers, polling firms and Democrat politicians stole the 2020 Democratic election from Donald Trump, that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transgender and queer people are on a crusade to “raise” children to become LGBTQ themselves, that Covid-19 is making men more feminine and weaker and treatable with the anthelmintic ivermectin, that climate change has nothing to do with humans and that vaccination is dangerous, while Vladimir Putin is harmless.
Fox News fans watch CNN for $15 an hour
Two political scientists in the US wanted to know what happens when you take these viewers out of their universe. In September 2020, at the height of the presidential campaign between Trump and his successor Joe Biden, David Broockman of the University of California at Berkeley and Joshua Kalla of Yale University paid die-hard Fox News viewers $15 an hour to watch for a month to watch the program of the competing channel CNN seven hours a week. Real-time coverage quizzes and post-show polls were used to ensure the 304 participants—all staunchly conservative Republican supporters—were actually watching CNN. A control group of 459 Fox News viewers maintained their usual viewing habits at the same time.
Broockman and Kalla have now published what they found in a study entitled The Multiple Effects of Partisan Media on Viewers’ Beliefs and Attitudes: A Field Experiment with Fox News Viewers. Although habitual Fox viewers are largely very partisan, changing their media consumption had “multiple impacts on their factual beliefs, attitudes, perceptions of the importance of issues, and general political views,” the researchers write.
Much of the news in September 2020 revolved around police violence against African Americans and the Black Lives Matter protests, the presidential campaign and claims by Trump and Republicans that absentee voting leads to more voter fraud, and the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. Bloomberg columnist Matthew Yglesias extracted from the study how the participants’ views on these topics changed:
According to this, viewers who switched to CNN, compared to those who continued to watch Fox News, believed:
- with five percentage points higher probability that people have long-Covid
- six percentage points more likely that many foreign states have better virus control than the US
- 10 percentage points less likely that Joe Biden supporters would be happy when cops get shot
- 13 percentage points less likely that if Biden were elected, “many more cops would be shot by Black Lives Matter activists.”
- And they were seven percentage points more likely to support postal voting.
“These are significant differences, even if the group that switched to CNN remained very far to the right in their view of the American political landscape,” writes Yglesias. Especially since the experiment only lasted a month and Trump had for years discredited CNN and other media he did not like as alleged fake news.
According to Broockman and Kalla, the observed effects are in part due to a bias “what we refer to as biased reporting, in which biased broadcasters selectively report information, resulting in viewers learning unbalanced fact-finding.” Accordingly, CNN consumers have come to the conclusion that Fox News is hiding negative information about President Trump. In their study, the authors note that both CNN and Fox News apply “a tremendous amount of filtering to the information they present to viewers.”
“Partisan media not only provide their side with an electoral advantage – they can also pose a challenge to democratic accountability,” the researchers write. “How can a voter hold a politician accountable for wrongdoing if they don’t know that wrongdoing happened? Or how can voters reward a non-partisan politician for a good performance if their chosen media network doesn’t inform them about it? “
CNN viewers’ shifts in opinion were short-lived, however. In his analysis of the report, Washington Post correspondent Philip Bump notes that they “regressed when treated participants primarily reverted to their previous viewing habits.” In short: Fox viewers changed their minds when they got a glimpse of the reality outside of their information bubble. But when they turned their attention back to Fox, they also returned to their old universe.
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Source: Stern
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