The advent of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel has had no detectable effect on which party people vote for – or whether they vote at all, an intriguing new study reveals.
Fox’s political orientation is to the right of the rest of the media, and viewership has grown by leaps and bounds since the channel began operating in October 1996 – bringing a "new partisan perspective into political coverage on television,” according to the New York Times.
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Two economists – Stefano Della Vigna of the University of California-Berkeley and Ethan Kaplan of the Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University – set out to find if Fox has had an influence on voters.
They examined whether the introduction of Fox in a community increased the likelihood that residents there voted for George W. Bush over Al Gore in the 2000 election, as compared with how many voted for Bob Dole over Bill Clinton in 1996.
The economists found that towns that offered Fox by 2000 increased their vote share for the Republican presidential candidate by 6 percentage points, going to 54 percent from 48 percent.
But significantly, those towns that did not offer Fox actually saw an even larger increase of 7 percentage points, from 47 percent to 54 percent.
A similar finding emerged for congressional and senatorial elections, the Times reports. And voter turnout did not change within towns that had access to the Fox News Channel by 2000 when compared to towns that did not.
However, the share of Americans who believe that news organizations in general are "politically biased in their reporting” rose from 45 percent in 1985 to 60 percent this year, according to the Pew Research Center.
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