Posted on 10/29/2006 1:27:05 PM PST by saveliberty
Last week on The O'Reilly Factor, the high-flying Fox News Channel's most popular show, ABC News political director Mark Halperin confessed to a left-wing bias in many of the old, establishment television and print media, to the absolute delight of liberal-baiting host Bill O'Reilly.
"So you're admitting... maybe your own network tilts to the left?" a smiling O'Reilly asked, relishing the moment. "If I were a conservative," Halperin replied, "I understand why I would feel suspicious that I was not going to get a fair break at the end of an election. We've got to make sure we do better so the conservatives don't have to be concerned about that. It's not fair." "I think you're absolutely correct," O'Reilly said. "I mean, all I want is fairness in the media." Finally, O'Reilly gets vindicated for something he has been saying for years.
Except that few would agree that fairness is a virtue of O'Reilly or Fox News. Even though he tells his viewers they've entered a "No Spin Zone," on the very same show featuring Halperin, O'Reilly spread the spin on thick: "The left-wing press and the terrorists in Iraq have something in common," he said. "The terrorists want to damage the Bush administration, and so does the left-wing press."
This kind of opinionated exuberance surely makes for interesting television. But does it have other consequences? The authors of a soon-to-be-published study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics suggest so. They claim, using empirical data, that Fox News's overt conservative-Republican bias actually influenced people to vote for the Republican Party in 2000, and to turn out in greater numbers to do so. They call it "The Fox News Effect."
"Fox didn't have an effect only for (electing President George W.) Bush, but in general in voting for Republicans," explains the study's co-author, Stefano DellaVigna, professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley. "So one can infer that people didn't just listen and say, `Oh, Bush sounds good from the coverage on Fox.' It seems that Fox changed their ideological beliefs."
The Fox effect is pervasive enough that one can't discount it as the U.S. nears the Nov. 7 mid-term elections. As well, the authors say, it has implications on both sides of the border when it comes to concentration of media ownership.
Previous studies have shown that Fox News is to the right of both most other media and of elected members of Congress. A 2004 study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press also showed that, while more Democrats watched CNN, more Republicans watched Fox.
Fox's salty-tongued chief, Roger Ailes — a former Republican political operative — has always called CNN "boring" and scoffed at accusations of a conservative bias on his network.
He recently told the Associated Press that simply presenting different viewpoints made Fox stand out from all the left-leaning coverage. Despite this — and despite the channel's slogan, "Fair and balanced" — viewers will often see anchors Sean Hannity or John Gibson literally screaming at guests who don't share their conservative views, or keying on stories that, unlike its other mainstream competitors, highlight the liberal-conservative and, especially, secular-religious divide.
It is this premise of conservative bias that the study, done for the non-profit, non-partisan National Bureau of Economic Research, begins with. Because the Fox News Channel was introduced to the U.S. in 1996 and adopted by cable companies on a town-by-town basis, the researchers had a perfect opportunity to compare the effect on voting in towns with access to Fox to those without, leading up to the disputed 2000 presidential election.
DellaVigna and co-author Ethan Kaplan found that Fox News increased the Republican share of the vote in towns with Fox by 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points. "That's not very large," DellaVigna says, "but it's still large enough to decide a close election, like in 2000."
Recall that the 2000 ballot ended up a debacle. It came down to Florida and left the American public hanging for more than a month before a historic Supreme Court decision ended the recounts, giving the race to Bush. He won by just 537 votes in Florida. The Fox News Effect, the study calculates, could account for more than 10,000 of the votes cast in the state.
What share of the non-Republican voting audience was influenced by Fox News to vote Republican? Calculating "persuasion rates" using data on Fox viewership and the pre-Fox share of voters for each party, the economists came up with between 3 and 8 per cent for those who watched some Fox News, or between 11 and 28 per cent for those who watched more religiously, DellaVigna explains.
The economists also found that Fox affected voting patterns for Senate elections, even though the network barely covered them, suggesting that Fox "appears to have induced a generalized ideological shift." In addition, they found that Fox increased voter turnout, especially in more Democratic districts.
It is this last finding that Carleton University communications professor André Turcotte finds the most important, particularly for Republicans and right-leaning parties.
"The real impact of Fox News is not so much its ability to change peoples' minds," Turcotte says, "but to increase the mobilization effect, to convince and embolden the conservative base to show up at the polls and vote Republican. This can have a real impact on the outcome, because if you can change voter turnout by even, say, five per cent, you can decide an election."
He is less persuaded by the idea of an ideological shift and more inclined to believe Fox News is simply convincing people with rightward tendencies.
"In the U.S., there's a long history of many conservatives considering themselves independent," he says. "So Fox is persuading those conservatives that the Republican Party is for them."
These real-life impacts of media bias are not lost on people who work inside the political beltways. Turcotte himself was the former Reform Party's pollster until 2000. He says there was tremendous media bias against the party during election campaigns.
"I hated it," Turcotte says. "It's part of the equation you can't control. We knew the media would not be positive toward Reform and toward (then-leader) Preston (Manning) in particular."
While there was no Fox News equivalent here, the National Post started up in 1998, providing, as Turcotte calls it, "a counterbalance." Fox News's role as a "counterbalance" was one of its original goals, according to Ailes. But if DellaVigna and Kaplan's data are correct, what about the effect on voting patterns by media that lean the other way? The same study, cited by DellaVigna, that stated Fox was to the right of both other media and congress, also said most media, such as The New York Times, lean to the left.
Turcotte, however, believes such a voter effect would be blunted in this case, since those attuned to liberal media are already mobilized to vote. "They're the establishment; these people are part of the electorate," he says. "Fox has been able to reintroduce a segment of the population that probably has given up on politics or voting."
Knowing how the media can affect voters is useful, but it's also complex. DellaVigna's data is from a time when Fox News was in its infancy. Today, it dominates U.S. cable news. Even so, many pollsters and pundits are predicting a Democratic rout on Nov. 7.
"If you think that far more people watch Fox News now, then the effect would be bigger," DellaVigna reasons. "On the other hand, it's possible it goes the other way — that, at the beginning, people thought it was relatively unbiased and that Bush really was a very talented candidate for president, and now instead they see some sort of bias on Fox, so more people listen to it but do so more carefully."
While Fox News is now available in Canada, it's the same version as the one available in the U.S., with little attention paid to Canada. Hence, no Fox News Effect here. Still, DellaVigna says the policy implications of his research transcend borders.
"This reinforces the idea that because people are persuaded by the media, you don't want to relax rules on media concentration and allow one person to own everything." Could a Canadian version of Fox News do the same here? When Fox started 10 years ago with a promise to beat out CNN, people snickered. Fox met that goal far ahead of schedule — and evidently, its last laugh still echoes.
LOL I think the point is that no one involved with this article who "hates" FNC has ever really watched FNC.
Bwhahahahahahahhaha
That must be how the NYT sees that it is centrist.
;-) I don't think that we are allowed (by MSM types) to decide for ourselves what we think "Balanced" is.
We are free to do as we are told. Now hand over our paychecks.
I agree that more North Americans will choose conservative, but I think in part because conservative over here means something a little different than in Europe.
I think that there is an opposing worry in Europe - a need for financial security and a fear of taking it on your own. I am not saying that Europe isn't home to freemarket types. I am just saying that there are different dynamics there.
;-) And 1980, 84, 88 were just anomalies.
:-) Exactly
:-) I think then young Mr. Wallace is perhaps looking for safer venues.
LoL.. funny how that works out..
Just maybe most people are not drooling eye rolling Moonbats..
What a concept indeed..
Are most of the NoN Fox newscasts drooling eye rolling affairs?...
Hmmmmm... Its something to think about...
:-) Nicely done. Have you read "South Park Conservatives"?
Well no $**t, Sherlock! What has the MSM been doing for years if not being an ongoing pep rally for Democrats?! Why all the shock that FoxNews might cause people to vote Republican? Maybe its the first time they heard the truth in their entire lives.
The author has not seen FNC and probably think that it's BOR and Sean Hannity 24/7
:-) Ditto that. He also did a fair job with David Letterman (the clip is on Hot Air if you haven't seen it)
You think he'll leave. I wish. Put someone within FoxNews that's a true conservative...as in the vain of Tony Snow. Hopefully, if Wallace leaves this time they'll pick from within.
Assuming this isn't a new phenomenon, it is safe to assume that all news outlets effect the turnout of thier viewers.
If the turnout is driven by the bias of any network, then it has been decidedly liberal before Fox and solely supporting the Demoncrats.
An inference is that Fox makes a difference not because of their message, but in spite of their competitor's message.
Well said.
:-) My mileage may vary? LOL!
I am not that kind of gal. And I think that you are nicer than she deserves, but if she's whom you fancy, write her a letter.
Or how the race in FL was called before the polls were closed? I don't think that conservatives will fall for that again any time soon.
I haven't. For most of my life I read two or three books a week, and several newspapers daily. In 2001 I lost my left eye, and my remaining eye it not reliable enough to read too much.
If I should read it, let me know.
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