I few days ago I wrote a post about an observation I made while at the gym. There are multiple televisions mounted on one wall of the cardio room and at one end FOX News is always on and at the other end CNN is always on. I made the observation that Fox News is almost always running some story to portray Biden poorly while the CNN television covers a wide variety of different news stories, both domestic and international. Watching them simultaneously it was very apparent to me that Fox News is a propaganda machine and CNN is actually a news channel.
It turns out, I was not the only one to make such an observation. I read an article in the Boston Globe yesterday that originated in the New York Times written by Ruth Igielnik that describes research done by two researchers who looked into this very question. Political scientists, David Broockman (UC Berkeley) and Joshua Kalla (Yale) designed an experiment to answer the question, “Does watching more conservative media change your views or are you more attracted to it because of your views.?”
As part of the experiment, they randomly assigned Fox News viewers to watch CNN for a month, and then compared their political views after they switched to CNN with the Fox viewers who did not make the switch. So, what happened? “Getting conservative news viewers to watch mainstream news caused many of the participants to shift away from hard-right views on issues such as immigration and race relations.” They also found changes in how participants evaluated Trump.
Interestingly, participants who switched to CNN even started to question their trust in Fox News. In addition, “Republicans who consume nonconservative mainstream media were more likely to say charges against Trump were legitimate, that Trump knowingly made false claims about the election being stolen, and that he should be found guilty in the election interference trial in Washington.”
One of the most depressing, but not surprising, things I read in this article was the fact that in the poll they took 100 percent of the Republicans who said they got their news from Fox News or other conservative sources said they intended to support Trump in the general election. However, of the Republicans who watched other media sources like CNN for their news, only 79 percent said they were supporting Trump and 13 percent said they were voting for Biden.
It is quite obvious that pushing a con artist like Trump must be very lucrative for Fox News. One would have thought that after the $787.5 million defamation settlement with Dominion and facing another huge defamation lawsuit by Smartmatic ($2.7 billion) they might have toned things down a bit – nope! Full steam ahead in pushing Trump’s propaganda. These days, ‘Fox ‘News’’ has to be one of the biggest oxymorons in use on a daily basis and clearly one of the biggest threats to democracy at work today. Perhaps we should all rewatch the James Bond film, “Tomorrow Never Dies” to see what happens when a media mogul tries to control the public narrative like Murdoch has done at Fox News. It was supposed to be fiction – but here we are!!
