[Mb-civic] The Fox News Effect

[Linda Hassler]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050406M.shtml

   The Fox News Effect
     By Richard Morin
      The Washington Post

      Thursday 04 May 2006

      We report. You decide. Does President Bush owe his controversial 
win in 2000 to Fox cable television news?

      Yes, suggest data collected by two economists who found that the 
growth of the Fox cable news network in the late 1990s may have 
significantly boosted the Republican Party's share of the vote in the 
2000 election and delivered Florida to Bush.

      "Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 8 percent of its 
audience to shift its voting behavior towards the Republican Party, a 
sizable media persuasion effect," said Stefano DellaVigna of the 
University of California at Berkely and Ethan Kaplan of Stockholm 
University.

      In Florida alone, they estimate, the Fox effect may have produced 
more than 10,000 additional votes for Bush - clearly a decisive factor 
in a state he carried by fewer than 600 votes.

      Fox cable news debuted in 1996 as a competitor to CNN and four 
years later was available to about one in five Americans. That allowed 
DellaVigna and Kaplan to compare changes in the Republican vote share 
from 1996 to 2000 in 9,256 cities and towns where Fox News was 
introduced. They also examined election cdata from 2004.

      The Experiment: The Fox Effect II

      We experiment. You decide: Do people apply a political litmus test 
to the news?

      Yes, suggest the results of the latest online experiment by The 
Washington Post, washingtonpost.com and Stanford University's political 
communication lab.

      The test found Republicans preferred to get their news from Fox - 
even when the news stories were about subjects far removed from 
politics, such as sports or travel.

      On the other hand, Democrats avoided Fox when it came to political 
news and preferred National Public Radio and CNN. And when the news 
focused on controversial issues such as the Iraq war and politics, 
"partisans are especially likely to screen out sources they consider 
opposed to their political views," said Stanford professor Shanto 
Iyengar, director of the communication lab.

      More than 2,000 people participated in the test of whether 
attention to the identical news story was increased or decreased when 
the story was attributed to Fox News, NPR, CNN or the BBC. Participants 
saw a brief headline accompanied by the logo of the news organization. 
They were asked to choose which story they wanted to see, then repeated 
the task across six news categories - American politics, the war in 
Iraq, race in America, crime, travel and sports.

      There was one twist: Some participants saw a story attributed to 
Fox, whereas others saw the same story attributed to CNN, NPR or the 
BBC. Comparing the percentage of Democrats who chose to see a story 
about race if it was on Fox vs. CNN offered clues about whether 
partisanship mattered.

      The results found strong evidence that people apply a political 
litmus test to the news, avoiding sources they view as unfriendly while 
seeking out compatible sources, a finding confirmed by researchers at 
Polimetrix in a national study with a representative sample of adults 
done in cooperation with the Stanford lab.

      The Republicans even preferred to get news about sports and travel 
from Fox while Democrats didn't have as strong a preference on 
non-political stories, Iyengar found.

      --------

      A complete analysis of the results of the latest Post-Stanford 
experiment can be found at www.washingtonpost.com.