As I have noted
before, economists are getting into media studies (we are natural
imperialists) and beginning to provide empirical evidence on an age
old, and critical, debate. Are some media outlets biased simply because
their viewers or readers are partisan, or do these media outlets play a
causal role in changing political views? And do readers/viewers
discount the bias in media outlets, or does this influence how they
vote?
We now have clear
evidence on this in the case of US News Channels, and the answer is
that Fox News changes votes in a big way: by magnitudes easily enough
to swing elections. Those who argue that partisan right wing media
does not matter very much now need to bring some counter-evidence to
the table if they want to sustain that position.
The latest piece of
evidence has just been published in the American Economic Review. Why
is the study
in a top-rank economics journal? One thing empirical economists are
used to doing is looking for good ‘instrumental variables’, which in
this particular case, means finding something that influences whether
people watch Fox News that has nothing to do with their politics. If
you then look at what these ‘accidental’ viewers do, that gives
you a handle on the causal role of watching Fox News.
Dylan Matthews at
Vox has an excellent explainer piece
on the research, so I will not repeat the details here. Let me
instead just list four key points.
-
Fox News is the dominant (by primetime viewers) US news channel. A sizeable minority of Fox News viewers are not Republicans.
-
The study’s data does not go beyond 2008, but in that year they estimate that if Fox News had not existed, the Republican vote share would have been over 6% points lower.
-
In contrast the more left wing MSNBC was far less effective at gaining votes for Democrats.
-
Fox News is not just setting its ideology to maximise viewers - it is much more Conservative than that. Instead it choice of ideology maximises its persuasive power.
The ‘headline
figure’ of over 6% points in point (2) is an overestimate because
other networks do shift their ideology to gain viewers. So if Fox
News disappeared, other networks might have shifted right to capture
ex-Fox viewers. But the key point is that Fox is acting in a way to
maximise the propaganda power of its extremely right wing message,
and it is successful in changing a significant number of voters
minds. The apologist line that the media is ‘just reflecting the
views of our readers/viewers’ does not hold for Fox News. In short,
it is a propaganda organisation, not a ‘for profit’ news
organisation. During one sample period, an analysis
of the content of Fox suggested that over half the facts it reported
were untrue.
One of the nice
things about the study is that its results are reasonably consistent
with earlier work based on the initial roll out of Fox News in 1996
to 2000 (which I referenced here).
That earlier analysis used a different method to identify the causal
impact of Fox on voters choices, so it is good that two different
methods come to similar conclusions.
To some this will
be no surprise (except perhaps that the research is in an
economics journal). To paraphrase Obama, if he watched Fox News even
he wouldn’t vote for himself. It fits my own account
of how US politics has shifted so far to the right, and has become so
partisan. To UK readers the obvious question is whether we can just
substitute Mail/Sun/Express for Fox. In my view
you can, and Brexit goes a long way to proving
that. But explicitly or implicitly, the consensus view appears
otherwise. Whether from left, right or centre, analysis of voter
behaviour typically ignores or marginalises the role of the press.
This and earlier studies suggest that is no longer good science.
Fox and their UK
equivalents in the press have an importance way beyond academic
studies of popular opinion. The story of Fox News and Trump are
inextricably linked, as is Brexit and the right wing press. When you can serve large sections of the population real fake
news - news that denigrates particular minorities or
‘outsiders’ and pushes the political views of their owners - then
tyranny becomes quite compatible with democracy. Governments wield
the ‘will of the people’ against pluralism and the rule
of law, all enabled and even dictated
by media as propaganda. We have examples
within the EU and on its doorsteps. We are not there yet in the UK
and US, but we are getting very close.
