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What happens when a group of Fox News viewers watch CNN for a month?


aubiefifty

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Watching Fox News can be like entering an alternative universe. It’s a world where Vladimir Putin isn’t actually that bad, but vaccines may be, and where some unhinged rightwing figures are celebrated as heroes, but Anthony Fauci, America’s top public health official, is an unrivaled villain.

Given the steady stream of misinformation an avid Fox News consumer is subjected to, the viewers – predominantly elderly, white and Donald Trump-supporting – are sometimes written off as lost causes by Democrats and progressives, but according to a new study, there is still hope.

Related: Biden finds Murdoch ‘most dangerous man in the world’, new book says

In an unusual, and labor intensive, project, two political scientists paid a group of regular Fox News viewers to instead watch CNN for a month. At the end of the period, the researchers found surprising results; some of the Fox News watchers had changed their minds on a range of key issues, including the US response to coronavirus and Democrats’ attitude to police.

The findings suggest that political perspectives can be changed – but also reveals the influence partisan media has on viewers’ ideology.

Polls have previously shown that viewers of Fox News, the most-watched cable news channel in the US, are far more likely to believe the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen than the average American, and are more likely to believe falsehoods about Covid-19.

The extent of the network’s influence on American politics was highlighted this week, with a report that Joe Biden has privately referred to Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, as “the most dangerous man in the world” and “one of the most destructive forces in the United States”.

David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, political scientists at the University of California, Berkeley and Yale university, respectively, paid 304 regular Fox News viewers $15 an hour to instead watch up to seven hours of CNN a week during the month of September 2020. The switchers were given regular news quizzes to make sure they were indeed watching CNN, while a control group of Fox News viewers continued with their regular media diet.

Much of the news cycle in September 2020 focused on policing and protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, which began after Jacob Blake, a Black man, was shot and seriously injured by police in late August. During the protests Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager from Illinois, shot and killed two men and wounded another. The events became a political tool for Republicans, including Donald Trump, who later announced he would send federal law enforcement agents to Kenosha.

By the end of September, the CNN watchers were less likely to agree that: “It is an overreaction to go out and protest in response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin” and less likely to believe that: “If Joe Biden is elected President, we’ll see many police get shot by Black Lives Matter activists”, when compared with their peers who continued watching Fox News.

The CNN switchers were also, as Bloomberg’s Matthew Yglesias reported, 10 points less likely to believe that Joe Biden supporters were happy when police officers get shot, and 11 points less likely to believe that it is “more important for the President to focus on violent protests than the coronavirus pandemic”.

In addition the CNN viewers were 13 points less likely than the Fox News viewers to agree that: “If Joe Biden is elected President, we’ll see many more police get shot by Black Lives Matter activists.”

In an email interview, Kalla said he and Broockman had not necessarily expected people’s opinions to change.

“I think the most surprising finding is that shifting people’s media diets from Fox News to CNN for a month had any effect,” Kalla said. “People who watch cable news tend to be very politically engaged and have strong opinions about politics, limiting the impact of the media. Similarly, they also tend to be strong partisans who might not trust any source not associated with their party.”

Fox News can influence its viewers through ‘agenda setting’, ‘framing’ and ‘partisan coverage filtering’.

 

Fox News can influence its viewers through ‘agenda setting’, ‘framing’ and ‘partisan coverage filtering’. Photograph: Ted Shaffrey/AP

 

The people in the experiment, Kalla said, were “overwhelmingly pro-Trump Republicans”. Given Trump had spent much of his presidency bashing CNN – a regular chant at his rallies was “CNN sucks!” – the results are particularly surprising.

“A lot of people might expect this audience to completely resist what CNN had to say, but we see people learning what CNN was reporting and changing their attitudes, too. It is therefore surprising that watching CNN had any impact at all in this experiment,” Kalla said.

Fox News, and liberal networks, can influence their viewers through “agenda-setting” – covering a certain topic relentlessly – and “framing”, Kalla said – by emphasizing certain aspects of an issue.

Kalla and Broockman were particularly interested in a third method of influencing: “partisan coverage filtering” – which they defined in the study as the process where “partisan outlets selectively report information, leading viewers to learn a biased set of facts”.

They gave a hypothetical example of how news channels might cover a war. In the example, CNN might cover the cost of the war and the number of military personnel and civilians who died. Fox News, on the other hand, could focus on the severity of the threat that Trump’s military campaign had countered, and feature stories of liberated civilians welcoming American soldiers.

“This leaves viewers of each network with different factual understandings of the conflict, and subsequently different levels of support for the conflict and the president,” Broockman and Kalla wrote.

Most of the CNN switchers stuck to the length of the task, according to the study. But once it was over, and the $15 an hour was taken away, “viewers returned to watching Fox News”, Kalla said.

While the study proved that people are susceptible – at least under the right conditions – to different political opinions, in the longer-term the skewing of media has had a broader, and negative, impact on the way the US functions, Kalla said.

“When politicians do something bad, we hope that voters will punish them, irregardless of their party – otherwise, politicians won’t have to work hard to make our lives better in order to keep their jobs,” Kalla said.

“However, this type of behavior becomes less possible if the media engages in partisan coverage filtering. If CNN doesn’t cover bad things Democrats do or good things Republicans do, and if Fox News doesn’t cover bad things Republicans do or good things Democrats do, then voters become less likely to learn this information and less able to hold their elected officials accountable.

“This is troubling for the functioning of a healthy democracy.”

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Interesting study. Would like to know some of the other conditions. Were they allowed to keep watching Fox News during that month, or any other news outlet they usually used? If so, were they limited to the same number of hours?

Would also like to see the results of the opposite study - those that identify as very liberal watching Fox News for a month.

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1 hour ago, I_M4_AU said:

I would imagine watching CNN for a month you would  become mind numb and blind.

actually i do not watch them to be honest. i want to hear the news and let me make my own opinions ya know? i am sure we all feel this way. i have watched some msnbc because they were covering the war. and to be honest i got tired of cnn saying they have breaking news when it is almost a day old.................

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1 hour ago, Leftfield said:

Interesting study. Would like to know some of the other conditions. Were they allowed to keep watching Fox News during that month, or any other news outlet they usually used? If so, were they limited to the same number of hours?

Would also like to see the results of the opposite study - those that identify as very liberal watching Fox News for a month.

https://osf.io/jrw26/

 

 

The study encouraged people to watch CNN during the same time periods they would normally watch FoxNews, but didn't specifically forbid participants from Watching FoxNews also if they wished.  

 

I think MSNBC would be a closer comparable to FoxNews on the left than CNN would be, and I would be interested in seeing a study on the opposite political spectrum too. 

I would think you would see some similar outcomes, but statistically Democrats and Liberals are already much more likely to get their news and information from multiple different sources both online and on tv, while conservatives are more likely to exclusively stick to one or two sources for all their news. 

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46 minutes ago, aubiefifty said:

actually i do not watch them to be honest. i want to hear the news and let me make my own opinions ya know? i am sure we all feel this way. i have watched some msnbc because they were covering the war. and to be honest i got tired of cnn saying they have breaking news when it is almost a day old.................

FOX does the same thing about Breaking News and it is annoying.  I watch other outlets and to see where they differ and try to make up my mind.

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Just now, I_M4_AU said:

FOX does the same thing about Breaking News and it is annoying.  I watch other outlets and to see where they differ and try to make up my mind.

as an aside we now have three iam4u's................you dropping kids onus now? lol

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1 minute ago, aubiefifty said:

as an aside we now have three iam4u's................you dropping kids onus now? lol

Yes, and they’re all heterosexuals.  :poke:

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what are you telling me that for by gawd? and can they tie their own show laces? lol i am almost 67 i am non sexual.......................

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4 hours ago, Leftfield said:

Interesting study. Would like to know some of the other conditions. Were they allowed to keep watching Fox News during that month, or any other news outlet they usually used? If so, were they limited to the same number of hours?

Would also like to see the results of the opposite study - those that identify as very liberal watching Fox News for a month.

are you talking about tucker and hannity and the night gang? not many on there i can watch. hell i used to watch hannity when alan was on the show with him. biggest liar i ever saw until trump.now i watch local fox news sometimes.

Edited by aubiefifty
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6 hours ago, aubiefifty said:

Watching Fox News can be like entering an alternative universe. It’s a world where Vladimir Putin isn’t actually that bad, but vaccines may be, and where some unhinged rightwing figures are celebrated as heroes, but Anthony Fauci, America’s top public health official, is an unrivaled villain.

Given the steady stream of misinformation an avid Fox News consumer is subjected to, the viewers – predominantly elderly, white and Donald Trump-supporting – are sometimes written off as lost causes by Democrats and progressives, but according to a new study, there is still hope.

Related: Biden finds Murdoch ‘most dangerous man in the world’, new book says

In an unusual, and labor intensive, project, two political scientists paid a group of regular Fox News viewers to instead watch CNN for a month. At the end of the period, the researchers found surprising results; some of the Fox News watchers had changed their minds on a range of key issues, including the US response to coronavirus and Democrats’ attitude to police.

The findings suggest that political perspectives can be changed – but also reveals the influence partisan media has on viewers’ ideology.

Polls have previously shown that viewers of Fox News, the most-watched cable news channel in the US, are far more likely to believe the false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen than the average American, and are more likely to believe falsehoods about Covid-19.

The extent of the network’s influence on American politics was highlighted this week, with a report that Joe Biden has privately referred to Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, as “the most dangerous man in the world” and “one of the most destructive forces in the United States”.

David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, political scientists at the University of California, Berkeley and Yale university, respectively, paid 304 regular Fox News viewers $15 an hour to instead watch up to seven hours of CNN a week during the month of September 2020. The switchers were given regular news quizzes to make sure they were indeed watching CNN, while a control group of Fox News viewers continued with their regular media diet.

Much of the news cycle in September 2020 focused on policing and protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, which began after Jacob Blake, a Black man, was shot and seriously injured by police in late August. During the protests Kyle Rittenhouse, a teenager from Illinois, shot and killed two men and wounded another. The events became a political tool for Republicans, including Donald Trump, who later announced he would send federal law enforcement agents to Kenosha.

By the end of September, the CNN watchers were less likely to agree that: “It is an overreaction to go out and protest in response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin” and less likely to believe that: “If Joe Biden is elected President, we’ll see many police get shot by Black Lives Matter activists”, when compared with their peers who continued watching Fox News.

The CNN switchers were also, as Bloomberg’s Matthew Yglesias reported, 10 points less likely to believe that Joe Biden supporters were happy when police officers get shot, and 11 points less likely to believe that it is “more important for the President to focus on violent protests than the coronavirus pandemic”.

In addition the CNN viewers were 13 points less likely than the Fox News viewers to agree that: “If Joe Biden is elected President, we’ll see many more police get shot by Black Lives Matter activists.”

In an email interview, Kalla said he and Broockman had not necessarily expected people’s opinions to change.

“I think the most surprising finding is that shifting people’s media diets from Fox News to CNN for a month had any effect,” Kalla said. “People who watch cable news tend to be very politically engaged and have strong opinions about politics, limiting the impact of the media. Similarly, they also tend to be strong partisans who might not trust any source not associated with their party.”

Fox News can influence its viewers through ‘agenda setting’, ‘framing’ and ‘partisan coverage filtering’.

 

Fox News can influence its viewers through ‘agenda setting’, ‘framing’ and ‘partisan coverage filtering’. Photograph: Ted Shaffrey/AP

 

The people in the experiment, Kalla said, were “overwhelmingly pro-Trump Republicans”. Given Trump had spent much of his presidency bashing CNN – a regular chant at his rallies was “CNN sucks!” – the results are particularly surprising.

“A lot of people might expect this audience to completely resist what CNN had to say, but we see people learning what CNN was reporting and changing their attitudes, too. It is therefore surprising that watching CNN had any impact at all in this experiment,” Kalla said.

Fox News, and liberal networks, can influence their viewers through “agenda-setting” – covering a certain topic relentlessly – and “framing”, Kalla said – by emphasizing certain aspects of an issue.

Kalla and Broockman were particularly interested in a third method of influencing: “partisan coverage filtering” – which they defined in the study as the process where “partisan outlets selectively report information, leading viewers to learn a biased set of facts”.

They gave a hypothetical example of how news channels might cover a war. In the example, CNN might cover the cost of the war and the number of military personnel and civilians who died. Fox News, on the other hand, could focus on the severity of the threat that Trump’s military campaign had countered, and feature stories of liberated civilians welcoming American soldiers.

“This leaves viewers of each network with different factual understandings of the conflict, and subsequently different levels of support for the conflict and the president,” Broockman and Kalla wrote.

Most of the CNN switchers stuck to the length of the task, according to the study. But once it was over, and the $15 an hour was taken away, “viewers returned to watching Fox News”, Kalla said.

While the study proved that people are susceptible – at least under the right conditions – to different political opinions, in the longer-term the skewing of media has had a broader, and negative, impact on the way the US functions, Kalla said.

“When politicians do something bad, we hope that voters will punish them, irregardless of their party – otherwise, politicians won’t have to work hard to make our lives better in order to keep their jobs,” Kalla said.

“However, this type of behavior becomes less possible if the media engages in partisan coverage filtering. If CNN doesn’t cover bad things Democrats do or good things Republicans do, and if Fox News doesn’t cover bad things Republicans do or good things Democrats do, then voters become less likely to learn this information and less able to hold their elected officials accountable.

“This is troubling for the functioning of a healthy democracy.”

If they were doing true research they would have paid CNN Viewers to watch FOX news and then compare the results. There is no doubt in my mind you would see similar results the other way as if people only hear one side they start believing that side. That is why I watch multiple channels and read from multiple sources.

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4 minutes ago, AuburnNTexas said:

If they were doing true research they would have paid CNN Viewers to watch FOX news and then compare the results. There is no doubt in my mind you would see similar results the other way as if people only hear one side they start believing that side. That is why I watch multiple channels and read from multiple sources.

i watch local news and read yahoo a lot as they seem to be somewhat fair. i hate i have to go to msnbc for the war news. let me ask you this tho. have you ever seen cnn edit a tape for their own agenda like fox does from time to time?

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6 minutes ago, aubiefifty said:

i watch local news and read yahoo a lot as they seem to be somewhat fair. i hate i have to go to msnbc for the war news. let me ask you this tho. have you ever seen cnn edit a tape for their own agenda like fox does from time to time?

I can't honestly say I have but when they just had a show on disinformation they only pointed at Fox and when confronted by a student on disinformation on CNN they basically ran away from the question.  The HS kids they accused of racism with the American Indian, they actually had film showing whole story in this case they didn't edit it they just didn't show the whole thing. The ignoring Hunter Biden story even after it has been confirmed the laptop was real and many of the emails have been confirmed to be legitimate.

I know that Fox is biased and has an Agenda but so does CNN, MSNBC, etc. 

Lets get back to my point by only picking FOX voters and paying them to watch CNN the study was biased from the beginning. In study of this type there should have been 4 groups. 

Fox viewers polled before watching CNN on various issues then polled after.

Fox viewers polled at beginning then polled at same time as other group of Fox viewers

CNN viewers polled before watching FOX on various issues then polled after.

CNN viewers polled at beginning then Polled at end.

All  done during same news cycles  for all viewers. 

 

I think if done this way you will prove that many people are affected by what they watch which to me is no great surprise. Now if study had been done this way and the questions were worded fairly and the same for all then you would have a legitimate study.  Over the years one thing I have learned about Polls is how questions are worded also affects the outcomes of the polls. Sadly Polls are often done using leading questions that affect the answers. 

 

 

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1 hour ago, aubiefifty said:

are you talking about tucker and hannity and the night gang? not many on there i can watch. hell i used to watch hannity when alan was on the show with him. biggest liar i ever saw until trump.now i watch local fox news sometimes.

Was talking about their news segments, not opinion and entertainment shows. I wouldn't expect the study to have the subjects watch Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon, Tucker Carlson, or Sean Hannity. 

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50 minutes ago, Leftfield said:

Was talking about their news segments, not opinion and entertainment shows. I wouldn't expect the study to have the subjects watch Anderson Cooper, Don Lemon, Tucker Carlson, or Sean Hannity. 

there were two guys i would listen to if they were on. i think chris wallace was one but he got tired of the crap and lies and he quit. i forgot the other one. and of course the left has their own but i do see truth. watch bil maher sometime. he gets on the libs way more than the dems and he and i think mostly alike other than peta. there are a few other things but i also go watch him for the comedy and if he makes a good point i enjoy that as well. hell i like joe rogan and he is basically a somewhat comedian and i agree with a lot of what he says. maybe we are too quick to put labels on things?

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3 minutes ago, aubiefifty said:

there were two guys i would listen to if they were on. i think chris wallace was one but he got tired of the crap and lies and he quit. i forgot the other one.

Shepard Smith?

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1 hour ago, AuburnNTexas said:

I can't honestly say I have but when they just had a show on disinformation they only pointed at Fox and when confronted by a student on disinformation on CNN they basically ran away from the question.  The HS kids they accused of racism with the American Indian, they actually had film showing whole story in this case they didn't edit it they just didn't show the whole thing. The ignoring Hunter Biden story even after it has been confirmed the laptop was real and many of the emails have been confirmed to be legitimate.

I know that Fox is biased and has an Agenda but so does CNN, MSNBC, etc. 

Lets get back to my point by only picking FOX voters and paying them to watch CNN the study was biased from the beginning. In study of this type there should have been 4 groups. 

Fox viewers polled before watching CNN on various issues then polled after.

Fox viewers polled at beginning then polled at same time as other group of Fox viewers

CNN viewers polled before watching FOX on various issues then polled after.

CNN viewers polled at beginning then Polled at end.

All  done during same news cycles  for all viewers. 

 

I think if done this way you will prove that many people are affected by what they watch which to me is no great surprise. Now if study had been done this way and the questions were worded fairly and the same for all then you would have a legitimate study.  Over the years one thing I have learned about Polls is how questions are worded also affects the outcomes of the polls. Sadly Polls are often done using leading questions that affect the answers. 

That should have been the way to do the study. Very odd that no one here or doing the study even considered it...lmao...

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3 minutes ago, Leftfield said:

Shepard Smith?

he was one i had forgotten so there is one more i think.

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3 minutes ago, DKW 86 said:

That should have been the way to do the study. Very odd that no one here or doing the study even considered it...lmao...

we are just examples of poor leadership on this board where they have let yall........cough cough......errrr um us down   lol

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I check the following sites/TV channels almost daily for news:

The Washington Post
New York Times
Reuters
BBC News
CNN.com
Drudge Report
FoxNews.com (they'd get more of my time if they didn't have that annoying "turn off your adblocker" pop up)
NBC Nightly News
 

I check the following here and there if something big is happening or just to check in and see how they cover it:
CNN (the cable channel)
NBCNews.com
The Bulwark
The Dispatch
The Atlantic
Real Clear Politics (mostly during election years)


I almost never read/watch these, but will poke my head in once in a while during an election year or something:
Fox News Channel
MSNBC

I typically avoid all the talking head opinion shows at night on all the channels.


 

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On 4/11/2022 at 8:29 AM, I_M4_AU said:

I would imagine watching CNN for a month you would  become mind numb and blind.

And suicidal!

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