In a clear illustration of the power that Fox News holds over Trumpian Republicans, a recent poll carried out by The New York Times showed that 100% of the Republicans who said they got their news from Fox News or other conservative sources intend to support Donald Trump in the general election, while among Republicans whose main media sources are more liberal outlets like CNN and major news organizations, only 79% plan to vote for Trump, and 13 percent said they planned to vote for President Biden.
This result strongly suggests that Donald Trump badly needs the unwavering and highly biased support of the network that in 2023 was exposed for its cynical and dishonest coverage. “The most prominent stars and highest-ranking executives at Fox News privately ridiculed claims of election fraud in the 2020 election, despite the right-wing channel allowing lies about the presidential contest to be promoted on its air” said a report.
At the time of the clamorous revelations, The Guardian printed that Fox’s reputation was “in tatters” as “many of its top executives and on-air personalities never believed his lies about the 2020 election, and even personally disliked the former US president.”
However, predictions of Fox’s demise or at least its disgrace, proved to be premature, even after it lost the mega-lawsuit against Dominion Voting Systems and had to pay out $787 million.
The poll demonstrated that it has lost none of its allure or credibility among Trump supporters. The division that the poll uncovered confirms research that shows that changing the media habits of Fox News consumers may actually change their views.
According to The New York Times, “across many measures, mainstream media Republicans are less supportive of Mr. Trump. They are 20 percentage points less likely than conservative media Republicans to say they are enthusiastic about Mr. Trump as the party’s nominee and more than 30 percentage points less likely to say Mr. Trump’s policies have helped them personally.”
Two political scientists, David Broockman at Berkeley and Joshua Kalla at Yale, conducted an experiment trying to determine whether viewers were influenced by media or whether they simply turned to sources that confirmed views that were already entrenched. “We know from our other research that many Fox News viewers are in an echo chamber and are quite conservative,” Mr. Broockman said. “There’s a lot of skepticism that strong partisans could not be persuaded and we wanted to challenge that assumption.”
In their experiment, they randomly assigned Fox News viewers to watch CNN for a month, comparing their political views after they switched to the network with Fox viewers who did not make the switch.
The result was eye-opening. Many of the conservative news viewers who had watched mainstream news for a month shifted away from hard-right views on a number of issues like immigration and race relations. “It was amazing to see that the study participants learned new facts about the world from watching CNN,” Mr. Kalla said. “These are people who don’t trust CNN; they think it’s propaganda and fiction.”
“The fact that they find that these people, in particular, learn something new about the world suggests that they’re more open to persuasion and hearing the other side than we might assume,” he added.
Participants did not just moderate their views on key issues, they also started to question their trust in Fox News itself.
Even more significant is that the pollsters found changes in how participants evaluated Donald Trump. Republicans who consume nonconservative mainstream media were more likely to say that the 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, according to a December survey.
