2020 study on the way Fox News directly harms democracy

[Bucky]

The whole point of the conservative news bubble is to create mental architecture against being persuadable, which is the soul of having political debate in a democracy. To get Fox viewers to question their own mental pipelines, the study had them to completely tune out their kool-aid sources for a full month and just watch middle-of-the-road CNN content.

Here's two news articles (1,2) about the study's results and a link to the actual published research report (3):

(1) https://www.salon.com/2022/04/04/can-fox-news-viewers-be-deprogrammed-paying-them-to-watch-cnn-makes-them-less-gullible_partner/

(2) https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/apr/11/fox-news-viewers-watch-cnn-study

(3) https://osf.io/jrw26/

The abstract reads:

Partisan media impacts voting behavior, yet what changes in viewers’ beliefs or attitudes may accompany these impacts is poorly understood. We present a field experiment in which we recruited a sample of regular Fox News viewers using data on actual TV viewership from a media company. We then incentivized them to watch CNN instead for a month, shifting the slant of their media diets.

Despite regular Fox viewers being largely strong partisans, we found manifold effects of this change in their media diets on factual beliefs, attitudes, perceptions of issues’ importance, and overall political views. We show that these effects stem in part from partisan outlets selectively reporting information, leading viewers to learn a biased set of information. 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.

Full report available at link (3)

[crickets]

1. Frustrating that after the study ended and they were no longer being paid

to watch CNN, viewers went right back to Fox. *sigh*