The media system in the USA is a threat to democracy, as a study by the University of California, Berkeley and Yale University shows. Viewer behavior was examined during the time when then US President Donald Trump and his challenger Joe Biden fought for the highest office. It was about how the reporting by the Trump-friendly “Fox News” and the more neutral channel “CNN” shapes the opinions of viewers.
Changing media changes minds
Berkeley political scientist David Broockman and Yale colleague Joshua Kalla studied how viewers who watched “Fox News” changed their attitudes toward current issues when they instead watched “CNN” for a month. Result: After the change, views changed significantly, reports the media platform “Media Matters”. "We recruited a series of subjects who regularly watched 'Fox News' and offered them the option of watching 'CNN' for a month instead," said the researchers.
“Although regular Fox users are largely Republican supporters, we found serious changes in factual beliefs, attitudes, issue salience, and general political views,” the study authors said. Specifically, the changers came to the conclusion that “Fox News” was hiding negative information about President Trump. Political scientists interpret that anyone who only watches “Fox News” is massively prejudiced. “Partisan media endangers democracy,” it concluded.
No TV news better than “Fox News”
As Bloomberg columnist Matthew Yglesias notes, there were measurable changes in the beliefs of Fox News viewers, even though viewers remained politically "very right-wing." The proportion of those who believe in Long Covid increased by five percentage points after the change. The share of those who believe other countries have gotten the virus under control better than the United States increased by six percentage points. The number of people who thought Biden supporters were “happy” when police were killed fell by 10 percentage points, and 11 points fewer thought the president thought fighting violent protesters was more important than the coronavirus -Virus.
Opinion polls have repeatedly shown that Fox News viewers are exposed to so much misinformation that they are less informed than people who watch no news at all. They are also more likely to believe lies about important issues like COVID-19 and vaccines than other viewers who rely on mainstream news outlets. The study's authors attribute this phenomenon "in part to a bias we call partisan reporting filtering, in which partisan media outlets selectively report information."
Source: pte
Related to the topic: Conservative US media promotes conspiracy beliefs
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