“Fox persuasively argues . . . that given Mr. Carlson's reputation, any reasonable viewer arrives with an appropriate amount of skepticism about the statements he makes."
U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil citing Carlson’s and Fox’ own court documents in a 2020 defamation lawsuit filed by Trump-linked Playboy model, Karen McDougal. Using this argument, the court dismissed McDougal’s lawsuit. Fox refers to Carlson as a Fox News “host.”
We all know that the United States is profoundly polarized, perhaps irreconcilably. Never before have varying political constituencies been able to select a news source that reflects their inherent biases and local sentiments to the exclusion of contradicting stories. When cable news opened a 24/7 pattern of offerings to fill the many hours and generate precious subscriber-and-ad-generating dollars, opinion became the driving “time filler” for many. For those who still get their news via old world cable television, already and older crowd, the age demographics are 60+, slightly older for Fox News, slightly younger for CNN.
The schism between red and blue is wide, so wide that researching academic pollical scientists from Yale University (Joshua Kalla) and the University of California at Berkeley (David Broockman) decided to join forces to research the political influence of two of the most prominent cable news services in a head-to-head attitudinal experiment on typical Fox News viewers. To keep an already-complex subject a bit simpler, their targets were viewers who followed Fox News who were paid to watch CNN.
For those who question how professors from purportedly liberal elite universities could ever be relied on for accuracy, I ask their skeptics if they get their legal and medical advice in real life situations by eliminating any professional who may have attended one of these “elite” schools. As my bio shows, I am a graduate one such institution and can provide first-hand testament that these institutions became “elite” precisely because of the rigor they apply to academic research.
The results of Broockman’s and Kalla’s demographic analysis – The manifold effects of partisan media on viewers’ beliefs and attitudes: A field experiment with Fox News viewers – was published on April 3rd and reviewed and summarized by Mike Cummings in the April 13th YaleNews. The study is filled with statistical results, well worth reviewing directly (https://osf.io/jrw26/), but the findings and the headlines are generated by those detailed metrics. The abstract to the published work reads:
Partisan media impacts voting behavior, yet what changes in viewers’ beliefs or attitudes may underlie these impacts is poorly understood. We recruited a sample of regular Fox News viewers using data on actual TV viewership from a media company, and incentivized them to watch CNN instead for a month using real-time viewership quizzes. Despite regular Fox viewers being largely strong partisans, we found manifold effects of changing the slant of their media diets on their factual beliefs, attitudes, perceptions of issues’ importance, and overall political views. We show that these effects stem in part from a bias we call partisan coverage filtering, wherein partisan outlets selectively report information, leading viewers to learn a biased set of facts. Consistent with this, treated participants concluded that Fox concealed negative information about President Trump. Partisan media does not only present its side an electoral advantage—it may present a challenge for democratic accountability.
Cummings summarizes the report and its conclusions: “The experiment provided evidence that partisan media outlets, by filtering out unflattering or negative information about their preferred ideological side, weaken the electorate’s ability to evaluate the performance of elected leaders. It also found evidence that, by setting the news agenda through its coverage choices, partisan media strongly influences the issues its viewers deem most pressing…
“[The researchers] recruited a sample of regular Fox News viewers and paid a random subset of them to watch rival cable news network CNN from Aug. 31 through Sept. 25, 2020. They found that the people who switched to CNN for four weeks developed different views on a variety of issues, including President Donald Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial justice protests that followed the killing of George Floyd, than those who continued watching Fox News.
“The researchers performed a transcript analysis of the content of each networks’ primetime broadcasts, documenting significant differences in the issues and events they covered during the study period with Fox News far more likely to report facts favorable to Republicans and CNN likely to do the same concerning Democrats. For example, CNN devoted substantially more broadcast time than Fox News to the pandemic’s severity and Trump’s failure to control it. By contrast, Fox News coverage consistently downplayed the pandemic as a public health threat and emphasized Trump’s efforts to protect Americans from the virus, according to the study.
“At the same time, their analysis found, Fox News focused its coverage on the racial unrest that gripped the United States in the summer of 2020, consistently indicating that Joe Biden and the Democratic Party supported the protestors’ tactics and demands. Both networks covered voting by mail but approached the issue from opposing perspectives with CNN describing it as largely secure and Fox News suggesting it was vulnerable to fraud.
“Three waves of follow-up surveys captured the opinions of people who’d switched to CNN and those who continued watching Fox News, exposing significant differences between the two groups. For example, participants who watched CNN were 11 percentage points less likely than the Fox News viewers to believe that it is more important for the president to focus on violent protests than the COVID-19 pandemic. They were six points more likely to believe that many foreign countries were more effective than the United States at controlling the coronavirus. The switchers were six percentage points less likely to believe that then-candidate Joe Biden supported eliminating all funding for the police. They were seven percentage points more likely to support voting by mail and nine percentage points less likely to agree that mail-in voting would generate widespread fraud.
“The people who switched to CNN became more negative in their appraisals of Trump, including his management of the pandemic, his intelligence, and his honesty, according to the study. Switching to CNN also made people more aware of bias in Fox News’ coverage. For example, the switchers were less likely to agree that ‘If Donald Trump did something bad, Fox News would discuss it.’
“However, the study showed the people who watched CNN did not become more positive in their evaluations of Biden or change their partisan identifications. A final survey, conducted two months after the incentivized period, offered little evidence that participants had continued watching CNN regularly. Many of the effects of watching CNN on their views and attitudes dissipated over time, the study found.” Hence the study shows that those with right-leaning biases were more likely to accept conspiracy theories and political misstatements… even when given the opportunity to views contrary reporting, even when confronted by obvious factual evidence.
“Our study shows that Fox News doesn’t simply reinforce beliefs that its viewers already hold, it also feeds them a biased set of facts that leaves them with a warped understanding of factual reality,” said Broockman… “That many of our participants’ attitudes shifted back to their preferred ideological perspective after they stopped watching CNN suggests that partisan media serves to replenish people’s partisan loyalties and political beliefs, giving it formidable power over our discourse.” If this is the impact of scheduled media, what is the power of social media which targets and caters to individual biases in its audience (to enhance ad revenues) to reinforce falsehoods?
I’m Peter Dekom, the question of political accountability, even democracy itself, faces a growing existential threat from the willingness to sacrifice truth for ratings.
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