Millions of Americans count right-leaning Fox News as their primary source of information about politics and current events. A new working paper co-authored by Yale political scientist and CSAP faculty affiliate Joshua Kalla presents evidence of the influence such partisan media outlets wield over people’s attitudes on the major issues of the day.
For the study, Kalla and co-author David Broockman of the University of California-Berkeley, conducted an experiment in which they recruited a sample of regular Fox News viewers and paid a random subset of them to watch rival cable news network CNN from Aug. 31 through Sept. 25, 2020. They found that the people who switched to CNN for four weeks developed different views on a variety of issues, including President Donald Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial justice protests that followed the killing of George Floyd, than those who continued watching Fox News.
Read the full story by Mike Cummings on YaleNews.
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