What Happens To Fox News Viewers When They Are Paid to Watch CNN? New Study Shows Surprising Results

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For decades political scientists have worked to document and detail the connection between partisan media consumption and voter behavior. A famed study from 2006, “THE FOX NEWS EFFECT: MEDIA BIAS AND VOTING,” quantified how viewing Fox News helped Republicans gain some 0.3 percent of the popular vote between 1996 and 2000.

Now, two political scientists, David Broockman of Stanford and Joshua Kalla of Yale, have done a deep dive into understanding the specifics behind how partisan media can drive voter behavior.

The researchers dropped a new term into the discussion and framed their thesis around looking beyond just the content and the bias delivered on cable news to argue that the choice of topics covered, “partisan coverage filtering,” largely leads “viewers to learn a biased set of facts.”

“We distinguish between two mechanisms for media influence prior research on traditional media has emphasized, agenda setting and framing, as well as a third mechanism that has received less emphasis in the literature but we argue is important for understanding partisan media, partisan coverage filtering,” the researchers write.

Broockman explained the purpose behind the study on Twitter, noting, “We have a lot of evidence partisan media effects vote choice, but we actually know little about why this might happen. What changes viewers’ beliefs, attitudes, or priorities might accompany these shifts in votes?”

To answer these questions Brookman and Kalla studied a group of regular Fox News viewers and paid a segment of them (the treatment group) to watch CNN instead for 7 hours a week for all of September 2020. The publication of the study Monday, as Broockman proudly points out, is the culmination of five years of work for the two researchers.

The two researchers ensured the treatment group actually watched CNN by giving them news quizzes. The study’s results were then found by comparing those news surveys against surveys of the Fox News viewers who did not switch to CNN.

“Compliance with watching CNN was high in the treatment group; the median participant correctly answered 14 of the 15 quiz questions we asked over the course of the five quizzes,” the study notes of its participants, who were paid an additional fee for completing the quizzes.

The results of the study “found manifold effects of changing the slant of their media diets on their factual beliefs, attitudes, perceptions of issues’ importance, and overall political views.” The treatment group that watched CNN changed their attitudes from those who continued watching Fox News on a variety of issues from Covid-19, Donald Trump, Black Lives Matter, and even Fox News itself.

Those who watched CNN, for example, were 5 percent more likely to believe in long Covid and 6 percent more likely to believe other countries did a better job combatting Covid-19 than the U.S. – as compared to those viewers who continued watching Fox News.

Additionally, the treatment group was 10 percent less likely to believe Biden supporters were happy when police officers got shot and 11 percent less likely to agree the president should focus more on stopping violent protests in the U.S. than controlling the coronavirus.

The treatment group was also 7 percent more supportive of mail-in voting than the control group that continued watching Fox News.

Broockman explains the difference in coverage on Fox News and CNN on these topics during September 2020:

During Sept 2020, CNN gave viewers extensive information about Trump’s failures to protect the US from COVID & the dangers posed by the virus in the days before vaccines.

Fox barely did, instead largely telling viewers COVID was no big deal & Trump took seriously.

Our control group was still watching Fox & saw completely different reality. According to Fox, Biden & Democrats were cheering on violent protests supposedly ransacking American cities. Meanwhile Dems were trying to steal election with mail-in ballots. pic.twitter.com/U10ZIpWsUe

— David Broockman (@dbroockman) April 3, 2022

He adds, “Our control group was still watching Fox & saw completely different reality. According to Fox, Biden & Democrats were cheering on violent protests supposedly ransacking American cities. Meanwhile Dems were trying to steal election with mail-in ballots.”

The study results also found that viewers in the treatment group became aware of partisan filtering.

“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,” the researchers found.

It is worth noting that the Fox News viewers in the survey “were nearly all very conservative and strong Republicans,” which the study notes did not change after watching CNN. Interestingly, Fox News of all the cable outlets boasts the most ideologically diverse audience and Tucker Carlson actually draws the largest audience of young Democrats in all of cable news, viewers who apparently did not participate in the study.

“We show US partisan media also filters information, leading to huge gaps in its viewers’ knowledge that benefit its side,” Broockman noted of his key finding.

“One of my favorite results is that our respondents agreed: We conducted our experiment in Sept 2020. After a month of watching CNN instead of their usual Fox News, our participants were less likely to agree that ‘If Donald Trump did something bad, Fox News would discuss it,’” Broockman concluded of his study.

Read the full study here