A new pre-print study, The Manifold Effects of Partisan Media On Viewers' Beliefs and Attitudes: A Field Experiment with Fox News Viewers, involved paying people who would typically watch the American Fox News cable channel to instead watch CNN: another 24-hour cable news station.
The distinction between these stations and their editorial slant is important to this study's purpose: Fox News is considered to be essentially a mouthpiece of the conservative Republican Party, while CNN is generally considered to be more left-leaning on average, though with more political variety—they feature both left- and right-leaning editorial sources—compared to Fox.
The idea was to see what would happen to the political views of folks who typically watch Fox, but who were paid to watch CNN, instead, for a period of four weeks. They were paid a median "wage" of $15/hour for 7 hours each week over the course of the relevant period to incentivize adherence to the study's structure, and semi-regular quizzes on the topics covered in the news were used to test adherence to the viewing schedule.
The findings were fairly stark: CNN covered a lot of topics that Fox did not during the study's operational period, and folks who were paid to watch CNN actually changed their minds about (or adjusted their stances on) several issues after viewing this other news source for a month.
The study found that switchers were 5% more likely to believe that long-COVID is real, 6% more likely to believe that foreign countries outperformed the US in terms of controlling COVID, 7% more likely to support voting by mail, and 10% less likely to believe that supporters of President Joe Biden (who was a candidate at the time, as the study was conducted in 2020) were happy when police officers were shot in the line of duty.
Switchers were also 11% less likely to say violent protests are a more vital issue than handling COVID-spread, and 13% less likely to believe that if Biden were to be elected, a whole lot of police officers would be shot by Black Lives Matter protestors.
Important to note here is that these are relatively small changes—it's not like half the people who switched to watching CNN for a month suddenly decided to alter their beliefs. And the beliefs that were changed aren't fundamental: the conservative viewers who watched a different channel for a while didn't become liberals or even seriously consider alternative voting patterns, they merely seemed to become more aware and accepting of grayscale zones between their politics and those of other people (who they might typically think of as opponents).
This study is interesting because it addresses a topic that dominates a lot of contemporary conversation about the media as a holistic entity, but the news media in particular.
Specifically, how much does the news we consume influence our perception of the world, and in turn influence our behaviors (and shape our filter bubbles): both in the voting booth and in the real-world (the decisions we make about everything from whether or not to get vaccinated to how we treat people we consider to be different from ourselves).
The findings—which still need to be peer-reviewed, so we'll see how much of this holds up after it's been put through that additional publication-wringer—line up with an earlier study conducted about 15 years ago on what was then called the "Fox News Effect," which attempted to measure how much of an impact watching Fox News had on voting patterns.
That study determined that this (at the time, still nascent) conservative cable channel nudged votes toward Republican politicians to the tune of something like .4 to .7 percentage points between the 1996 and 2000 elections. Which also isn't a huge push, but has been enough, at times, to tip close elections in favor of conservative candidates.
Fox News was the primary subject of both this earlier and the aforementioned more recent study in part because it's the archetypical slanted news coverage network in the US, and because it’s arguably the most successful of such networks, even today.
Fox doesn't really try to conceal the fact that it's heavily biased toward the Republican Party, either, and its embrace of this positioning has allowed it to become massively culturally influential, but also incredibly popular. And that's part of why other networks, like the relatively moderate, but addicted to "breaking news"-style coverage CNN, and heavily left-leaning MSNBC have tried (with various degrees of success) to replicate Fox’s model for different audiences.
The jury is still out as to how much these other entities influence their targeted political demographics, and how much we should be concerned about all these influences and their impact on democratic values and systems.
It's also not clear what might be done about the issue if we do decide it's worth addressing at some point, and how much social networks and other communication platforms might amplify the polarizing effects of these partisan news networks.
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