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.
To wit: If Fox News causes an pro-Republican effect--what is, and has been, the effect of the "Alphabet" networks and the rest of the Establishment Press?
FWIW, there was a study (UCLA I think) that showed that Fox is actually very centrist-- based upon the think tank sources cited by FNC for news stories. The study compared the ACU and ADA ratings of Congress critters--and then examined the speeches for references.
But again, even if you accept the theory that FNC is biased to the right-- what does it mean if you also acknowledge that the rest of the MSM leans heavily to the left?
LOL Someone on FNC pointed out that the Fox bashers don't watch FNC and think that the whole day is BOR and Sean Hannity.
David Letterman admitted the other day to BOR that he doesn't know how to find Fox News, and yet he is a big basher.
LOL Sorry, that is cheap but effective. What about the Capital One commercials? I love ballerina Viking.
Yes they really don't know.
This is your brain on drugs.
Because they can't compete.
LOL
Now you know that fairness means to set conservatives up to be double if not triple teamed.
I've always enjoyed watching FoxNews Sunday...Wallace is so left leaning it's all over this news program now, and I can't even watch it any longer. Maybe after 2006 election is over, I'll be able again.
Republicans will remain majority in the House and the Senate...even as hard as all the networks have tried to demonize the Republicans...hardy har har har....
LOL
Or it's natural
This is your brain while on FOX...no "news".
I have to admit that cute I like the Summer camp one LOL!
very true
Spin? No, he's only stating the obvious.
So to all you statisticians out there, is it safe to assume that before Fox News, the left bias of the other MSM caused an even more dramatic vote count for the Democrats?
If Fox accounts for a .7% increase in votes for GOP candidates, does that mean that ABC, CBS, NBC, NYTimes, LATimes etc might account for something on the order of a 5-7% tilt towards the Democrats?
Would this explain the decades long grip that the Democrats had on the House before the "GOP revolution"?
My nose hit a brick wall at this point.
I find most people that claim to hate O'Reilly have either never watched his show, or watched some clip from MediaMatters, or "my friend said x,y, and z about him!"
:-) Bright points will always be Special Report with Brit Hume and his news team - Carl Cameron, Brian Wilson, Jim Angle, James Rosen, Wendell Goler, etc
Neil Cavuto
Beltway Boys
Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade
I don't have time to watch a lot these days, but I am happy to see what I can.
BTW Carl Cameron is reporting (accurately) that Michael Steele is within striking distance of winning, which ruins Dem Senate plans. If you haven't seen it, HotAir is showing Michael Steele defeat Ben Cardin pretty handily this morning. Cardin did not do well and was not supposed to be in danger.
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