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.
OoooooK! So, all it takes is one ONE fair outlet to change the world. LOL! What does that tell you?
And, Marxists/liberals/Democrats instinctively know that they need to repress the conservative message (and to "spike" news stories that present conservatives in a positive light) for exactly the same reason.
Repeating, most humans are innately conservative, and opportunities to hear both sides of political issues can easily overcome the "conservative override program" that liberals continually, continuously, perennially and perpetually need to scare it's masses into running.
Fox effect? Sorry Mister Chung.
It's just spontaneous deprogramming following balanced exposure to both sides of the political spectrum.
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I agree with that. FOX News is doing to the TV public what Rush Limbaugh did ten years ago- It is letting normal, conservative people that their views are not out of the mainstream. And, yes, that emboldens them to vote.
Fox has an audience because of conservative viewers.
There are not conservative because of Fox.
Besides even Fox is too liberal for me.
Best summary I've heard yet.
There are not conservative because of Fox.
Besides even Fox is too liberal for me.
ditto
IMO, after the election cycle, Brit will do something about it...he's got to be getting lots of complaints. He'll be toning Wallace down a bit or Wallace will tone himself down a bit. Give me a break...every morning news program is ridiculous even the local stations here in Houston. Pushing the DNC talking points. I'm sick of it.
Here we go again. We are so weak because we are conservative or republican we need to constantly be reminded of how we should vote. Well, let me tell you how wrong you(the author of the study)are.
Before the internet, conservative talk radio, Fox News, conservative blogs, and four or five newspapers in medium sized cities, the rest of the media spoke with one voice. There was precious little opportunity to respond, and even when there was, in the form of a letter to the editor or a rare op-ed piece, it was not seen or heard by many. The flow of information was tightly controlled. Even getting a conservative book published was like pulling teeth, and what reviews a published conservative received were more than likely to be snide, down the nose dismissals by reviewers with undeserved superiority complexes.
We were not only out of the game, we couldn't even get in the ballpark on game day.
William F. Buckley was was always quoted by the lefties when they sought to reassure us that we had our voice, even while cutting him down in the surrounding paragraphs. Oddly, they use Senator McCain in much the same way today, although they find it to their advantage not to criticize him. Buckley was infinitely smarter and more honest to his beliefs.
It was in the early 90s when things began to change, and after the election of Bill Clinton, the need became so critical that several things happened almost simultaneously. The vacuume began to attract competition from people who understood the market place. The big talent of Rush Limbaugh came along at the right time. He had few allies at the time, but he could quote the Washington Times or the American Spectator, but more importantly, he gave voice to millions of frustrated Americans who had been denied a voice for three decades. He made the Washington Post and the New York Times, among many other news sources, more fun to quote than the conservative ones. He was able to see the irony, understand it, and more importantly, condense it into a very entertaining three hours of knee slapping glee for millions of people who wanted exactly what he offered. The "I wish I had said that, because it is exactly how I feel" folks who usually listened from their jobs, trucks, tractors, delivery vans and others, until the Main Stream Media began to see him as a threat. By then, the Tsunami, always a surprise, had hit in full force.
People like Sean Hannity emulated Rush, and their radio markets began to flourish. Offshoots like Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin and others, who were well prepared to take up the intellectual challenges and go toe to toe with the fossilizing media grew in numbers.
People who were considered to be heros, Oliver North and Gordon Liddy to name two, also became spokesmen with followings.
Fox News came along. Laughter filled the board rooms of CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, and ei ei o.
The conservative dream slowly came to life. It is kicking ass. Just in time for the demise of the network big mouths.
It has been nice for me to watch, even participate in, over the past 40 years.
First off, the BOR show is an opinion show, not a news show, and BOR has never promoted it as such. Secondly, BOR goes to great lengths to allow the opposition to voice their opinions, although they often refuse to show up.
Finally, how is what BOR presented "spin," when it can be quantitatively be shown as fact. I once asked my aunt (who only reads the KC Star, the KC Jewish Chronicle, and US News and World Reports, and doesn't have cable, so she watches local and alphabet news) to name one thing that President Bush has done "right," according to her newspapers, or anything she's seen on the news. She thought about it for a while, and admitted that she couldn't remember ever seeing or reading anything positive about the Bush administration. You have to look long and hard to find anything in the MSM that gives the Bush Administration credit for anything good.
Mark
YMMV. I have a real soft spot for women.
Not too soft, though. The whole "never hit a woman" thing is ridiculous. I won't hesitate killing a jihadi or criminal just because she is wired differently than me.
Message to the Democrat Party: You already have at least 5 major news networks fawning all over your candidates. Shall I name them to refresh your (selective) memory? I think I will: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and NPR. And don't get me started about the NY and LA Slimes, Atlanta Urinal-Constipation, Slime-Warner, etc.
Your attacks on FOX for the past few years have completely insulted the intelligence of millions of Americans. Of course, all FOX has done is provide something you liberals can't stand: competition. In case you've forgotten (or are otherwise incapable of admitting), this greatest of nations was built on competition.
Still, you libs shouldn't worry...I mean, what can FOX hope to do against your 5 big networks? What are you so scared of?
I have three words of advice for you: Deal with it.
I think that I can sum up the contents of this article pretty susinctly in just one sentance:
"Fox News is presenting the sort of stuff we don't approve of, and they're not trying to suppress the conservative or republican vote, which is just wrong!"
I think that pretty much sums it up...
One other thing... IIRC, isn't it true that the majority of homes in the US still don't have cable, and therefore, don't have access to Fox News? I know that for a number of years, my cable provider (Time Warner Cable, big surprise, huh? didn't supply FNS on their system, so I dropped it and went to Primestar. Eventually I went over to Dish Network after Primestar folded. But I seem to recall that a minority of homes in the US subscribe to cable, and consequently don't have access to either FNS or CNN. So, they're stuck with the alphabet networks, which are demonstrably biased in favor of the leftists.
Mark
Yeah. Well, next time maybe do a little research?
I LOVE the chastened look on the Geico exec's face after that barb!
That whole ad has such a rich subtext to it.
"I don't have much of an appetite, thank you."
LOL
that would be a big no
But the article reports on a study that alleges that Fox converts people into conservatives.
Left unsaid is the fact that the news media made many recounts in Florida after the election and all of them found without any doubt that Bush won the state fair and square. But the usual media take when they write about it is that it was that nasty Supreme Court which prevented a real recount.
;-) Remember, they think that they are "Middle of the Road". They also do not understand that politically, they are in the minority.
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