When I say they think you’re stupid, this is the type of story I’m talking about. Several activist media outlets are touting a study arguing that when Fox News viewers started watching CNN, they suddenly become better informed on the issues of the day. To an objective person, it is not difficult to see why such a study might be flawed from the get-go. But this is a reality that seems to be lost on the left.
The study, which is titled, “The manifold effects of partisan media on viewers’ beliefs and attitudes: A field experiment with Fox News viewers,” was conducted by David E. Brockman and Joshua L. Kalla in September 2020. The results of the study were published last week. The report states:
Of 763 qualifying participants, we then randomised 40 per cent to treatment group. To change the slant of their media diet, we offered treatment group participants $15 per hour to watch 7 hours of CNN per week, during Sept. 2020, prioritising the hours at which participants indicated they typically watched Fox News.
Researchers found that those who watched CNN instead of Fox News for 30 days exhibited changes in attitudes and opinions on policy related to COVID-19.
“Despite regular Fox viewers being largely strong partisans, we found manifold effects of changing the slant of their media diets on their factual beliefs, attitudes, perceptions of issues’ importance, and overall political views,” the authors wrote.
Participants were more likely to agree that if former President Donald Trump made a mistake, Fox News would not cover it. The authors also noted that “CNN provided extensive coverage of Covid-19, which included information about the severity of the Covid-19 crisis and poor aspects of Trump’s performance handling Covid-19. Fox News covered COVID-19 much less.”
When it came to racial issues, the authors pointed out that Fox covered them “extensively but selectively about Biden and other Democrats’ supposed positions on them and about outbreaks of violence at protests for racial justice in American cities.”
MSBNC’s Zeeshan Aleem penned an op-ed gushing over the study, relishing how it intimated that Fox News wasn’t real news, while CNN is the pinnacle of journalistic credibility. He wrote:
Fox News’ coverage of the world is so extreme and so overtly propagandistic that it might seem that its viewers are impervious to information from more mainstream news outlets. But a new working paper suggests that, if they’re actually shown the information, Fox News viewers can be open to absorbing unflattering news about politicians they support and can change their minds about hot-button issues.
It’s a fascinating finding that hammers home how Fox News isn’t just reflecting right-wing viewers’ opinions back at them, but is also feeding them a distorted picture of the world that pushes them deeper into support for extreme ideological positions and politicians. And it doesn’t have to be this way.
Coming from the network that deliberately pushed the Russia collusion hoax nearly every day for years, this particular passage is quite rich. Indeed, the study’s primary flaw is that it does not acknowledge the all-too-apparent reality that CNN, along with other activist media outlets, is not exactly a trustworthy purveyor of news and has been functioning more as a propaganda mill for Democrats since 2015.
Author Dan Froomkin also chimed in with a piece for NBC News. “But the biggest takeaway for me is the realization that Fox viewers aren’t just manipulated and misinformed — they are literally being made ignorant by their consumption habits. Watching Fox, they hear a lot of “news-like” things, but they don’t learn about what’s really happening,” he wrote.
Froomkin continued, suggesting that people should “stop talking about Fox like it’s a different form of news – and start talking about how it isn’t news at all.”
Yeah, good luck with that.
What these people seem to forget is that Fox News routinely blows its left-leaning competition out of the water when it comes to ratings. CNN’s ratings, in particular, have experienced such an awful decline that shortly after Discovery bought the network, it began firing many of its leaders as part of an effort to move the organization back to actual reporting.
The bottom line is that Fox News is certainly right-leaning. But every other cable news outlet is blatantly skewed in favor of the left. Sure, if you watch Fox, you’re not going to get information being reported by the likes of CNN, NBC, and others. The reverse is also true.
The fact is that the authors of the study started with the premise that watching CNN somehow means being more informed. They forget that this is the network that promoted the “Fine People” hoax. The researchers seemed ignorant of how the network lied about podcaster Joe Rogan taking “horse dewormer” to cure COVID-19. There seems to be no mention of how the activist media outlet deceptively smeared the Covington kids. No mention of the network’s promotion of the false Russia collusion was made, either. Instead, they just assume that it is Fox News that is peddling “misinformation,” which is lefty-speak for “stuff we don’t like.”
The activist media can celebrate this study as much as they want. They can pat Brockman and Kalla on the back and buy them steak dinners for publishing this tripe. But they cannot change the reality that they have lost the trust of the American public — because of their duplicity and political activism disguised as journalism. Unfortunately for them, it does not appear they have learned their lesson.
