Until recently, StuartJRitchie felt relatively relaxed about the influence of Fox News. He thought nobody would watch this stuff unless they held pretty extreme views already 🔎 Stuart has taken a look at a new study that throws all that into doubt
And that leads us to the final point: to what extent do people generally watch TV that’s outside of their partisan bubble? This is a slightly different question from the one about channel viewership, because it asks: to what extent do people who watch a lot of one partisan TV channelThe answer, according to the new data, is: not much. For example, the researchers note, only 5 per cent of Republicans who watch eight hours of Fox News per month also watch at least four hours of CNN or MSNBC.
Overall, the authors conclude that worries about how partisan TV might be causing polarisation in public attitudes “cannot easily be dismissed”. I agree that their data should make us update our views towards being more concerned about the impact of these channels, though I’m not fully convinced about how bad they are.where they paid 300 Fox News viewers $15 per hour to watch CNN for a month.
There’s a final, extremely important point to make here. Although it’s good to know what effects partisan media might have on people’s political views, the automatic response shouldn’t be to argue that we should censor TV channels, or force “balance” on them.
Having hyper-partisan channels that amp up rhetoric and play fast and loose with the truth is certainly a bad thing – but trampling on free speech would be even worse. For my part, now Tucker’s off the air I’ll have to find something else to watch – perhaps something a little less brain-melting than Fox News. It’s hard, though, to imagine many other TV hosts that could scratch that same specific itch of exaggerated indignation that made me, and presumably millions of other viewers, keep coming back. And perhaps that, in a nutshell, is the problem.
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