The Fox News ad apparently points to internal polling conducted by YouGov. Public polling from YouGov released last year, though, makes a similar point: Fox News is the only news source that a majority of Republicans trusted in that survey, while Democrats expressed trust in a wide range of news outlets.
Since Republicans both trust and actually watch Fox News — that second factor being a central part of the Times ad — it gobbles up a disproportionate share of public confidence.
The question that has lingered for some time is how much of an effect Fox News’s coverage actually has. After all, on a given night, only a few million people are tuning into its programming according to viewership data, a tiny fraction of the U.S. population. Does Fox News or any other cable-news channel actually effect what the public thinks to a significant degree?
Last year, David E. Broockman of the University of California at Berkeley and Joshua L. Kalla of Yale University published research that showed at least some effect. They paid Fox News watchers to watch CNN instead of Fox shortly before the 2020 election and compared their views of current events with those who’d continued to watch Fox.
“[W]e found large effects on attitudes and policy preferences about COVID-19,” Broockman and Kalla wrote, referring to dominant subjects on CNN’s coverage during that period. “We also found changes in evaluations of Donald Trump and Republican candidates and elected officials.”
But that research didn’t measure how common viewership was or who was being influenced in that way. So, this month, Broockman and Kalla released a new paper, looking more closely at that question. Using data from a number of companies that have television-monitoring tool kits they determined that viewing partisan media was more common than we might assume — and that it gets more problematic from there.
“[W]e find that approximately 1 in 7 Americans consume over 8 hours of partisan media per month,” the study concludes; “that most partisan media viewers are not aligned strong partisans and do not have especially strong prior attitudes; and that they very rarely consume crosscutting partisan content or meaningful quantities of national broadcast media.”
Data from Bully Pulpit Interactive allowed the researchers to match viewership with voting households. The chart below shows how the “1 in 7 Americans” figure was determined: about 7 or 8 percent of the sample pool of viewers watched at least eight hours of either Fox News or, collectively, CNN or MSNBC in a month. Add them together and you get about 15 percent of the sample viewing at least 8 hours of one of those two options.
Notice that, by grouping CNN and MSNBC viewership as the partisan alternative to Fox News, we’re again seeing how Fox News is an outlier: only combining them do they match Fox News. (CNN was included with MSNBC as the opposing “partisan” option largely because past research had done so, finding that “in recent years both CNN and MSNBC’s coverage has been similarly liberal.” The extent to which this was a warranted reaction to the presidency of Donald Trump is left as an exercise for the reader — and for the new management at the network.)
Using data provided by Nielsen, the researchers found that fully 1 in 5 Republicans watch at least eight hours of Fox News each month, compared to 15 percent of Democrats who watch at least that much CNN and MSNBC. Democrats are also more likely to watch national broadcast news, according to the Nielsen data.
Overall, 1 in 4 Americans watches at least one hour of Fox News or CNN and MSNBC each month, according to the researchers’ analysis.
Most partisans don’t consume a lot of either their own side’s partisan cable news or the other side’s (meaning Democrats usually watch less than an hour of CNN and MSNBC combined and less than an hour of Fox News). They also usually watch less than an hour of broadcast news. But the researchers’ analysis also found that those who watch at an hour or more of their side’s partisan cable news were unlikely to watch more than an hour of either the other side’s partisan media or national broadcast news.
About 27 percent of Democrats watched at least an hour of CNN and MSNBC in a month; only 2 percent of Democrats also watched an hour of Fox News, according to the researchers’ analysis of Nielsen data. Among Republicans, 30 percent watched at least an hour of Fox News; only 4 percent of all Republicans also watched an hour of CNN and MSNBC.
The overlap with broadcast news was slightly larger among Democrats: Nine percent watched at least an hour of their partisan cable news and broadcast. Among Republicans, only 4 percent watched at least an hour of Fox News and of broadcast news in a month. Republicans were nearly twice as likely to watch eight hours of their partisan cable news and less than an hour of network broadcast news.
All of this is the context in which to consider Fox News’s post-election coverage. About 1 in 14 American adults watches at least eight hours of Fox News each month. Among Republicans who watch at least an hour of Fox each month, only about 13 percent also watch at least an hour of broadcast news or CNN and MSNBC.
Hence that dominance that Fox News touted in its Times ad. But this also gets at the heart of the lawsuit: Dominion argues, credibly, that Fox News was worried about losing that dominance to its competitors, leading it to give a platform to unproven or debunked claims of fraud.
