When they made statistical adjustments to hold constant differences in demographic characteristics and unemployment, and looked at differences in voting behavior between towns that introduced and did not introduce Fox within the same Congressional district, the availability of Fox had a small and statistically insignificant effect on the increase in the share of votes for the Republican candidate. Thus, the introduction of Fox news did not appear to have increased the percentage of people voting for the Republican presidential candidate. A similar finding emerged for Congressional and senatorial elections.Voter turnout also did not noticeably change within towns that offered Fox by 2000 compared with those that did not.I'd like to see a few studies on the Internet's effect on voting. I think that's where the real story is.
[...]
Why was Fox inconsequential to voter behavior?
[...]
The professors' preferred explanation is that the public manages to "filter" biased media reports. Fox's format, for example, might alert the audience to take the views expressed with more than the usual grain of salt. Audiences may also filter biases from other networks' shows.
The tendency for people to regard television news and political commentary as entertainment probably makes filtering easier. Fox's influence might also have been diluted because there were already many other ways to get political information.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
SHOCKER: Americans do not blindly follow the media
Astounding! According to a new study by Stefano DellaVigna of the University of California, Berkeley and Ethan Kaplan of the Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University, the introduction of the Fox News Channel into the market had no statistically significant effect on who people voted for, or voter turnout. (Via Drudge.) Apparently, people can think for themselves! This is bad news for those on either side who like to use the media as a scapegoat.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
This study if flawed beyond belief. Seriously the *best* that can be concluded from this study is that more people voted for Kerry than Gore. There was no repetition, no direct link, flimsy control, bad assumptions... this was a craptacular job of using statistics.
Have you got a link to the actual study itself, from whence you surely draw your conclusions? If so, mind sharing?
It seems to me that my distinguished fellow comemntor, the gentleman from Kansas, has taken exception to less than scientific nature of the study. Perhaps he was unaware that economists aren't really HARD scientists. Then again, maybe he was.
I am, of course, not an economist, but I do play one on TV. What I can gather from this description of this study is that it does indicate that Fox News had little signifigant impact on voter habits or turnout. While not Hard scientists, economists are rather good at mining past records for patterns. They have to be. If they weren't they'd never beable to convince anyone that their progtnostifications were anything more than wild guesses.
Honestly, I have little direct experience with economics, but one of the hallmarks of good economic data mining is that the results tend to be both surprising and (in hindsight) bloody frakking obvious.
I think this one has that quality. We've been trained to belive that Fox News is satan's spawn by a codre usually labed the vocal minority. The call Fox far rights and not representative of the people. Yet, the US consistantly polls as slightly more conservative than liberal and vastly more centrist than either of the above. Something like 30% conservative to 22% liberal leaving a massive 48% one the fence. The first blatantly conservative news-entertainment organization is bound to be wildy popular because it is tapping an under-catered-to market. Still, it won't really change voting habits, and when one looks at the raw numbers for Bushes second term victory, it falls in line.
Disputed state results (Washington and Ohio) aside, Bush pulled 51% of the vote, roughly. Not an overwhelming victoy in my mind. But when one notes that only about half of eligble voters actually voted, that works out to about 25.5% of the potential vote for Bush and about 25% for Kerry. This is well in line with the ideology poll results suggesting any influence from Fox news did not rise above the level of noise.
(Note, the poll referenced is a yearly poll taken by a national journalism association. It's used as a base line to compare the views of the public to the views of journalist that 'serve' it. The report it was in made news earlier this year under the headlines "Press negative on Bush" and permutations there of, as the researchers had found a lot more negative toned bush articles for a first term than there were negative Clinton arguments for the same time in office. I think you're aware of that one, and may have even blogged it, so I thought I'd mention it, just to provide some indication that I'm not making this crap up.)
Post a Comment