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Study: Fox News Won Election for Bush

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A study by two economists found that the growth of the Fox cable news network in the late 1990s may have significantly increased the GOP’s share of the vote in the 2000 Presidential election and delivered Florida to George 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 Berkeley and Ethan Kaplan of Stockholm University.

In Florida, they estimate that the Fox effect may have produced more than 10,000 additional votes for Bush, the Washington Post reports.

That would clearly be a decisive factor in a state he carried by fewer than 600 votes.

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  Fox cable news debuted in 1996 and by 2000 was available to about 20 percent of 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 aired.

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