Why pass a massive tax cut when employment is high and unemployment are low? Bruce Bartlett, former domestic policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan explains. From "The Washington Post":
"Because for decades, conservative intellectuals have pushed for big tax cuts; less to grow the economy and more because they want to “starve the beast.” They want to force a major overall spending cut that would be a political non-starter without first passing a tax cut that creates a deficit so large, something must be done about it. Spending cuts must be enacted, then, as they would be presented as the only way to pay for the already passed tax cut’s lost revenue."
https://is.gd/LRwJ1x
Showing posts with label Bartlett. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bartlett. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 18, 2018
Monday, February 12, 2018
Bruce Bartlett-Fox News
Bruce Bartlett
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Download the original PDF here:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2604679
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The creation of Fox News in
1996 was an event of deep, yet unappreciated, political and historical
importance. For the first time, there was a news source available virtually
everywhere in the United States, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with a conservative
tilt. Finally, conservatives did not have to seek out bits of news favorable to
their point of view in liberal publications or in small magazines and
newsletters. Like someone dying of thirst in the desert, conservatives drank
heavily from the Fox waters. Soon, it became the dominant – and in many cases,
virtually the only – major news source for millions of Americans. This has had
profound political implications that are only starting to be appreciated.
Indeed, it can almost be called self-brainwashing – many conservatives now
refuse to even listen to any news or opinion not vetted through Fox, and to
believe whatever appears on it as the gospel truth.
When Fox News went on the air in 1996, I thought it was “fair
and balanced,” just as it claimed to be. At the time, there was unquestionably
a liberal bias in the major media; not a huge one, but it was pretty consistent
across the three major networks, the New York Times, Washington Post,
Los Angeles Times and the rest of the elite media. 2 As Dartmouth
communications professor Jim Kuypers put it in a 2002 study, “There is a
demonstrable liberal bias to the mainstream press in America.” 3
Surveys regularly showed that very few reporters were
Republicans; the bulk said they were independents, with a large percentage
belonging to the Democratic Party. 4
Journalists argued that their professionalism kept bias out of their reporting
and that, insofar as there was apparent bias, it was due to the nature of the
news itself and the discipline of fact-based reportage. But even if the
reporting itself was free of bias, there is no question that the issues that
most interested
1 Revised June 3,
2015
2 Riccardo
Puglisi, “Being the New York Times: the Political Behavior of a
Newspaper,” B.E. Journal of
Economic Analysis & Policy, 11:1 (April 2011): article 20; J. Wilson Mixon
Jr., Amit
Sen and E. Frank Stephenson, “Are the Networks Biased?
‘Calling’ States in the 2000 Presidential Election,” Public
Choice, 118:1&2
(January 2004): 53-59.
3 Jim
A. Kuypers, Press Bias and Politics (NY: Praeger, 2002): 202. Arguably,
the generally positive coverage of Bill Clinton in the major media during the
Monica Lewinsky scandal is evidence of liberal bias. See Dhavan V. Shah et al.,
“News Framing and Cueing of Issue Regimes,” Public
Opinion Quarterly,
66:3 (September 2002): 339-70.
4 William
Glaberson, “More Reporters Leaning Democratic, Study Says,” New York Times
(November 18, 1992).
reporters tended to be ones more likely to be liberal in nature
than conservative. As the late journalist Michael Kelly once explained, “What
journalists choose and how journalists frame inescapably arises out of what
journalists believe. And, as a group, journalists believe in liberalism and in
electing Democrats.” 5
In any event, the view that the media was generally liberal was widespread
among the public. 6
Liberal
Media Dominance
Liberal media dominance arose from several factors. One was
simply the fact that liberal views were dominant in the country from the Great
Depression through the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. The conservative
view on civil rights, that racial segregation and discrimination were not
problems justifying federal contravention of states’ rights, was deemed to be
illegitimate among the vast bulk of Americans after being exposed to police
brutality against civil rights demonstrators and details about the reality of
racism. The Vietnam War and Watergate made the media’s liberal bias even more
pronounced even as the country had started to move to the right in many ways.
Another factor is that big cities, where the major newspapers
have always been located, tend to be more liberal than small towns and rural
areas. This is especially true for New York and Los Angeles, where the major
networks and media companies are based. In part, big city liberalism is just a
function of their nature, but also because liberally-minded people gravitate
there from the more conservative countryside. This has been true forever.
It should be added that liberally-minded people have long tended
to gravitate as well to journalism, just as conservatives are attracted to
careers in the military, law enforcement and business. Newspapers have long
complained that the liberalism of their reporters was less intentional than due
to the lack of conservatives getting degrees in journalism and seeking careers
as reporters.
A final factor contributing to liberal bias is that newspaper
consolidation tended to eliminate ideological competition in the industry. As a
competitive business, politics and ideology were ways in which newspapers
differentiated their product and attracted readers wanting to read news and
commentary friendly to their point of view. Thus in any 2-newspaper town, one
would generally be conservative if only for competitive advantage. 7 For historical
reasons, the
5 Michael Kelly, “A
Press Obsession With the Death Penalty,” Washington Post (June 28,
2000).
6 “Are
the News Media Too Liberal?” Gallup Poll
(October 8, 2003); “Republicans Remain Deeply Distrustful of News Media,” Gallup Poll
(October 8, 2007).
7 Numerous
studies have shown political slant to be a business decision more than one
driven by the ideology of a newspaper’s owner. See Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse
M. Shapiro, “What Drives Media Slant? Evidence from U.S. Daily Newspapers,” Econometrica, 78:1 (January 2010): 35-71; Sendhil
Mullainathan and Andrei Shleifer, “The Market for News,” American Economic Review, 95:4 (September 2005): 1031-53.
afternoon paper was usually the conservative one. But as growing
traffic congestion made it harder and harder to deliver afternoon papers in a
timely manner and work and lifestyle changes reduced demand for them, afternoon
papers began to die out. This gave the morning paper, which was usually the
more liberal, a dominant position in many markets.
The loss of competition from the right reinforced the liberalism
in already liberal newsrooms. As former Washington Post editor Richard
Harwood noted in the mid-1990s, after the first big wave of media
consolidation:
One of the most interesting
aspects of today’s premier news corporations – the ones with the rich editors,
officers and shareholders – is the counterintuitive fact that almost without
exception they have encouraged or acquiesced in the leftward drift of their
newspapers over the past quarter-century. 8
And even in cases where the dominant morning paper was the
conservative one, loss of competition tended to push it toward the left; that
is, leftward toward the center from a position on the right. The reason is that
monopoly newspapers often sought to be all things to all people and therefore
as inoffensive as possible. The Gannett chain was known for shaving the rough
political edges off all the papers it acquired, giving them a bland liberal
sameness in every market.
Of course, there was demand for conservative media. But prior to
the expansion of cable television and the rise of the Internet in the 1990s,
there was simply no easy way to satisfy it. There were only three networks that
broadcast just half an hour of news each day, and they tended to take their
cues from the major newspapers, adding only video to more or less the same reporting
one got in the papers. Magazines filled the gap to some extent and competition
continued to provide conservative alternatives. Among the news weeklies, Newsweek
tended to be liberal, Time was centrist, and U.S. News and World
Report was moderately conservative. 9 One could subscribe to
explicitly conservative publications such as National Review and Human
Events, as well as the liberal New Republic and left-wing
Nation magazines. But the lead time for printing and distributing
magazines, which tended to be monthlies or semimonthlies, made them
unsatisfying for those craving immediate news with a political or ideological
edge.
Radio and television were also subject to the “fairness
doctrine,” which said that equal time needed to be provided whenever a
political opinion was expressed. 10
This tended to eliminate the
8 Richard
Harwood, “When Downsizing Hits the Newsroom (Cont’d),” Washington Post
(April 17, 1996).
9 Daniel
Sutter, “Is the Media Liberal? An Indirect Test Using News Magazine
Circulation,” Applied
Economics, 44:27
(2012): 3521-32.
10 On
the history and operation of the fairness doctrine, see Thomas G. Krattenmaker
and L.A. Powe Jr., “The Fairness Doctrine Today: A Constitutional Curiosity and
An Impossible Dream,” Duke Law
Journal, 1985:1
(February 1985): 151-76.
expression of any opinions at all unless they were so close to
the conventional wisdom it was difficult to take issue with them. 11 While the
fairness doctrine, which was a Federal Communications Commission regulation,
didn’t apply to print media, it nevertheless had a spillover effect that
reinforced the moderate liberalism of most newspapers.
The
Rise of Talk Radio
In August 1987, under pressure from Ronald Reagan’s drive for
deregulation, the FCC abolished the fairness doctrine. A local radio
broadcaster in Sacramento, California, named Rush Limbaugh quickly recognized
the opportunity this afforded. A strong conservative, he realized that he could
now do an entire show consisting of nothing but controversial opinions, without
the burden of offering equal time to other views. His program went national in
1988, based at WABC in New York City, which had a signal powerful enough to
reach 200 miles beyond Manhattan.
Limbaugh’s move was fortuitous. At the exact moment he launched
his show, the AM band on the radio dial was essentially dying. Since the late
1960s, music programming and listeners had deserted AM radio in droves. The FM
dial provided a better signal and could broadcast in stereo, which became
increasingly important as musical styles changed. Unable to compete by
broadcasting music, AM stations searched for alternative programming. Talk
proved to be very viable. Soon there were talkers across the AM dial, many
expressing a conservative viewpoint. 12
There are many reasons why conservative talk radio worked so
well. 13
One is that conservatives finally had a news source that fed their philosophy.
Another is that conservatives viewed themselves as outsiders and were attracted
not only to the philosophy of conservative talk radio, but its tone and
articulation of outrage toward liberals that many listeners themselves had long
felt. 14
11
Thomas W. Hazlett and David W. Sosa, “Was the Fairness Doctrine a ‘Chilling
Effect’? Evidence from the Postderegulation Radio Market,” Journal of
Legal Studies,
26:1 (January 1997): 279-301.
12 Jeffrey
M. Berry and Sarah Sobieraj, “Understanding the Rise of Talk Radio,” PS:
Political Science &
Politics, 44:4
(October 2011): 762-67.
86-103.
14
Sarah Sobieraj, Jeffrey M. Berry and Amy Connors, “Outrageous Political Opinion
and the Political Anxiety in the US,” Poetics, 41:5 (October 2013): 407-32; Sarah
Sobieraj and John M. Berry, “From Incivility to Outrage: Political Discourse in
Blogs, Talk Radio, and Cable News,”
In his early years, much of Limbaugh’s program, which ran 3
hours a day, consisted of news that conservatives were unable to read in their
local paper or hear on television. 15
Conservatives in Congress, at think tanks and other activists saw there was now
an outlet for their legislation and studies and eagerly provided them to
Limbaugh, who gave them priceless publicity to a highly receptive audience.
As time went by, Limbaugh had many imitators, but no real
competitors. For all his faults, he has a great voice and a genuine knack for
radio broadcasting; his venture into television never worked. Limbaugh is also
entertaining, a fact that even his critics acknowledge. 16 Eventually, many local radio stations
decided it was cheaper to buy Limbaugh’s syndicated show rather than pay a
local talker. His broadcast reach broadened and his power grew.
Among Limbaugh’s friends and admirers was Roger Ailes, a
Republican political consultant and producer who had long dreamed of a
conservative television network. In 1970, he worked with the Nixon White House
to bring such a network into being. 17
The idea didn’t go anywhere, but Ailes continued to work on it, convincing beer
baron Joseph Coors to bankroll a conservative news service called TVN in the
mid-1970s. That effort failed as well, but Ailes learned a lot about how to
make a conservative network succeed. 18
Finally, in the mid-1990s, he convinced Australian newspaper magnate Rupert
Murdoch to let him build the news network Ailes had always dreamed of.
It should be noted that Murdoch has long been a conservative
ideologue and Fox News fit into a larger conservative empire he built over the
years that includes the New York Post and the Wall Street
Journal. Although the Journal has long had a conservative editorial
page, prior to Murdoch gaining control in 2007, its news pages were free
of bias. But soon after, a conservative tilt began creeping into the news
coverage. 19
Ann Davis Vaughn, a 14-year reporter at the Journal, has written about
how quickly the news operation came under rightward pressure, which was
often in the guise of simplifying a story or making it more interesting by
demonizing one of the people or firms in the article. 20
15 Stephan
Earl Bennett, “Who Listens to Rush Limbaugh’s Radio Program and the
Relationship Between Listening to Limbaugh and Knowledge of Public Affairs,
1994-2006,” Journal of
Radio & Audio
Media, 16:1
(May 2009): 66-82.
2011).
This report is based on documents obtained from the Nixon Library.
20
Ann Davis Vaughn, “The Gestation of a
Llama (or Why I Quit The Wall Street Journal),” in
Ink Stained:
Essays by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Class of 1992
(2013): 24.
The
Origins of Fox News
Ailes recruited conservative broadcasters wherever he could find
them, sometimes on the fringes of the industry; one of his stars, Bill
O’Reilly, got his start doing gossip for “Inside Edition,” a syndicated
tabloid-style program. According to a Fox producer, all the top people at Fox
were conservatives or did a good job of playing the part:
The ideology at Fox was
strictly a top-down affair. Roger [Ailes] was a conservative. All of his
deputies were conservatives. Most of the hosts were conservatives, or at least
were good at pretending to be while on television, if they knew what was good for
them….The VPs, as near as I could tell, were all staunch conservatives, too.
Whether by coincidence or design, Roger had effectively surrounded himself with
fellow travelers. 21
In its early years, Fox only needed to be in the objective
center to be to the right of the other major networks, because they tilted to
the left. 22
But Fox viewers were very right-wing from the start. 23 Numerous surveys show that Republicans
and conservatives overwhelmingly favor Fox in their news viewing. A 2010 Pew
survey found that Republicans and conservatives favored Fox over all other news
sources except Rush Limbaugh. The survey also revealed that Fox had fewer
well-educated (college graduate) and well-to-do ($75,000+/year income) viewers
than other news sources. 24
A 2015 PPP poll found that for 56 percent of Republicans, Fox was their most
trusted news source. 25
A 2015 Quinnipiac poll found that 35 percent of Republicans have “a great deal
of trust” in Fox versus just 11 percent of Democrats. 26
21Joe Muto, An Atheist in the
Foxhole (NY: Dutton, 2013): 78-79.
22 Tim
Groeling, “Who’s the Fairest of them All? An Empirical Test for Partisan Bias
on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox News,” Presidential
Studies Quarterly, 38:4
(December 2008): 631-57; Tim Groseclose and Jeffrey Milyo, “A Measure of Media
Bias,” Quarterly
Journal of Economics,
120:4
(November 2005): 1191-1237; Jeffrey N. Weatherly et al., “Perceptions of
Political Bias in the Headlines of Two Major News Organizations,” International
Journal of Press/Politics,
12:2 (April 2007): 91-104.
23 Jonathan
S. Morris, “The Fox News Factor,” International
Journal of Press/Politics,
10:3 (Summer 2005): 56-79; Shanto Iyengar and Kyu S. Hahn, “Red Media, Blue
Media: Evidence of Ideological Selectivity in Media Use,” Journal of
Communication,
59:1 (March 2009): 19-39.
68. Note: Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck were all on
Fox at the time.
26 “Fox
News Has Most Trusted Coverage, Or Not, Quinnipiac University National Poll
Finds; Tina Fey, Dennis Miller Top Choices To Replace Stewart,” Quinnipiac
University (March 9, 2015).
Audience Profiles: Party and
Ideology
(percent)
Percent of each audience who are | Republican | Democrat | Independent | |
Rush Limbaugh | 63 | 10 | 23 | |
Sean Hannity | 62 | 6 | 29 | |
O’Reilly Factor | 54 | 10 | 32 | |
Glenn Beck | 53 | 9 | 33 | |
Fox News | 44 | 21 | 28 | |
Wall Street Journal | 36 | 22 | 41 | |
USA Today | 33 | 26 | 35 | |
News blogs | 28 | 34 | 34 | |
Daily paper | 28 | 34 | 33 | |
Local TV news | 25 | 35 | 32 | |
TOTAL | 25 | 33 | 34 | |
Sunday shows | 24 | 37 | 32 | |
Network evening | 24 | 35 | 34 | |
Morning shows | 23 | 43 | 30 | |
News magazines | 22 | 40 | 34 | |
CNN | 17 | 47 | 31 | |
MSNBC | 14 | 53 | 30 | |
Daily Show | 14 | 41 | 38 | |
NPR | 14 | 40 | 41 | |
Colbert Report | 14 | 39 | 44 | |
Hardball | 13 | 51 | 29 | |
Rachel Maddow | 12 | 50 | 34 | |
New York Times | 9 | 49 | 39 | |
Countdown | 3 | 60 | 29 | |
27
“Americans Spending More Time Following the News,” Pew Research
(September 12, 2010): 56. Note: The Daily Show and the Colbert Report are
comedy shows, not straight news. However, studies have shown that comedy shows
like Colbert’s are in fact a major source of news for their viewers. Dan
Schill, “Understanding the ‘Heroes’ and ‘It Getters’: Fandom and the Colbert
Nation,” Mass
Communication and Society,
17:5 (2014): 754-75.
Most Trusted Media Outlet, 2015
(percent)
Most Trusted Outlet | Republicans | Democrats |
ABC | 10 | 14 |
CBS | 8 | 11 |
CNN | 10 | 21 |
Comedy Central | 0 | 6 |
Fox | 56 | 11 |
MSNBC | 2 | 6 |
NBC | 2 | 6 |
PBS | 7 | 18 |
Other | 6 | 7 |
Fox has a very old viewership; according to Nielsen, its median
viewer is 68 years old – great for ratings, but bad for advertising. 29 Companies tend to
shun programs with an older demographic because seniors are assumed to be set
in their ways and unlikely to be swayed by advertising to buy different
products from those they are already using. 30
To maintain the chimera of being “fair and balanced,” Fox has
always employed a few token Democrats and interviewed the occasional
progressive. However, the way issues are framed on shows such as “The O’Reilly
Factor,” Fox’s flagship program, always leads to predetermined conclusions,
affording only the appearance of reasonable consideration of alternative points
of view. 31
I know from personal experience how hard it is to get a word in edgewise when
being interviewed by Bill O’Reilly.
Studies show that Fox viewers have a distinct set of political
attitudes and voting patterns that are as much anti-liberal as they are
conservative. Indeed, they have a different perception of political reality
than those of all other television news viewers. 32 As media critic Michael Wolff put it
early in the Fox era:
Fox is not really about politics….Rather, it’s about having a
chip on your shoulder; it’s about us versus them, insiders versus outsiders,
phonies versus non-
29 Frank
Rich, “Stop Beating a Dead Fox,” New York
(January 26, 2014); Bill Carter, “Fox Viewers May Be Graying, But Their
Passion Still Pays,” New York
Times (July 23, 2013).
30 Isabelle
Szmigin and Marylyn Carrigan, “Learning to Love the Older Consumer,” Journal of Consumer
Behavior, 1:1
(June 2001): 22-34.
40:3
(May 2011): 315-46.
32 Jonathan S.
Morris, “Slanted Objectivity? Perceived Media Bias, Cable News Exposure, and
Political Attitudes,” Social
Science Quarterly,
88:3 (September 2007): 707-28.
Fox
Moves Rightward
In the George W. Bush years, however, and especially after the
terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, there was a noticeable shift in tone
at Fox. Rather than being satisfied with a position relatively to the right of
the other news networks, it began objectively tilting well to the right of
center. The shift was immediately noticed by media observers. 34 Whether driven by politics and
ideology or by ratings, the shift proved highly successful. 35 As Harvard press analyst Alex Jones
observed:
In a conservative time, a
time of war, Fox viewers like their news from a strong American perspective,
with flags rippling in graphics and a pugnacity toward the nation's critics –
the people John Gibson, host of Fox's nightly ”Big Story,” referred to last
week as the peanut gallery. Such blunt speaking is a point of pride at Fox,
which, for example, reports on “'homicide bombers”' in Israel, rather than
“suicide bombers.” 36
Economists and political scientists began studying the “Fox News
Effect,” in which the introduction of Fox News on a cable system had a
significant impact on voting for Republican candidates in that area. 37 It also caused
both Republicans and Democrats in Congress to increase their support for
Republican policies. 38
For example, Democrats exposed to Fox News became more hostile to Mexican
immigration. 39
(December
3, 2001).
35 On
how 9/11 increased support for Republicans, see Mark J. Landau et al., “Deliver
Us from Evil: The Effects of Mortality Salience and Reminders of 9/11 on
Support for President George W. Bush,” Personality
and Social Psychology Bulletin,
30:9 (September 2004): 1136-50.
(December
1, 2002).
37
Stefano DellaVigna and Ethan Kaplan, “The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and
Voting,” Quarterly
Journal of Economics, 122:3
(August 2007): 1187-1234; Daniel J. Hopkins and Jonathan
McDonald Ladd, “The Consequences of Broader Media Choice: Evidence from the
Expansion of Fox News,” Social Science
Research Network (December 11, 2013); Gregory J. Martin and
Ali Yurukoglu, “Bias in Cable News: Real Effects and Polarization,” NBER Working Paper No. 20798 (December 2014).
38
Kevin Arceneaux et al., “The Influence of News Media on Political Elites:
Investigating Strategic Responsiveness in Congress,” American
Journal of Political Science,
forthcoming; Joshua D. Clinton and Ted Enamorado, “The National News Media’s
Effect on Congress: How Fox News Affected Elites in Congress,” Journal of
Politics, 76:4
(October 2014): 928-43;
Buoyed by its success as an explicitly
conservative network, it appears that right-wing bias, including inaccurate
reporting, became commonplace on Fox. For example:
•
A study of network coverage
of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in 2005 found that Fox was alone in supporting
the Bush administration during a period when the wars were going badly by any
objective standard. It concluded that “scholars should consider Fox as
alternative, rather than mainstream, media.” 40
•
Fox instructed its on-air
talent to avoid using the term “public option” when discussing health reform
and are required to say that global warming is merely a theory “based on data
that critics have called into question.” 41
•
A 2010 study found that Fox actively spread rumors and
inaccurate information about a proposed mosque planned for lower Manhattan. 42 Its coverage is generally very
negative toward Muslims and Islam.43
•
A 2012 study found that Fox
takes a dismissive tone toward climate change and interviews a much larger
number of doubters than believers. Fox viewers are much more likely to be
skeptical of global warming. 44
A 2014 study found that 72 percent of references to climate change on Fox in
2013 were misleading.45
Elizabeth
Schroeder and Daniel F. Stone, “Fox News and Political Knowledge,” Journal of Public
Economics, 126
(June 2015): 52-63.
39
Homero Gil de Zúñiga, Teresa Correa and Sebastian Valenzuela, “Selective
Exposure to Cable News and Immigration in the U.S.: The Relationship Between
Fox News, CNN, and Attitudes Toward Mexican Immigrants,” Journal of
Broadcasting & Electronic Media,
56:4 (October 2012): 597-615.
40 Sean
Aday, “Chasing the Bad News: An Analysis of 2005 Iraq and Afghanistan War
Coverage on NBC and Fox News Channel,” Journal of
Communication, 60:1
(March 2010): 144-64.
42 Erik
Nisbet and Kelly Garrett, “Fox News Contributes to Spread of Rumors About
Proposed NYC Mosque,” Ohio State
University (October 14, 2010).
43 Fred
Vultee, “Jump Back Jack, Mohammed’s Here: Fox News and the Construction of
Islamic Peril,” Journalism
Studies, 10:5
(2009): 623-38.
44 Lauren
Feldman et al., “Climate on Cable: The Nature and Impact of Global Warming
Coverage on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC,” International
Journal of Press/Politics,
17:1
(January
2012): 3-31. See also Jon A. Krosnick and Bo MacInnis, “Frequent Viewers of Fox
News Are Less Likely to Accept Scientists’ Views of Global Warming,” Stanford
University (December 2010);
Jay D. Hmielowski et al., “An Attack on Science? Media Use, Trust in
Scientists, and Perceptions on Global Warming,” Public
Understanding of Science,
23:7 (October 2014): 866-83.
45
“Science or Spin?: Assessing the Accuracy of Cable News Coverage of Climate
Science,” Union of
Concerned Scientists (April 2014).
This was actually an improvement over 2011, when 93
percent of Fox references to climate change were found to be misleading: “Got
Science? Not at News Corporation,” Union of
Concerned Scientists (September 2012).
•
A 2013 study found that Fox
strongly contributed to the misperception that the Affordable Care Act included
a provision for “death panels” that is still widely held among conservative
critics of the legislation. 46
•
A 2014 study found that Fox
consistently tilted its coverage of the 2007/2009 recession in favor of the
wealthy and the business class. 47
Fox’s bias is so bad that even some conservatives can’t stomach
it. Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, one of the most conservative Republicans in
Congress, has said, “There are certain shows on Fox I can’t watch. Because
they’re totally not fair and totally not balanced.” 49
And Fox’s slipshod handling of facts was even acknowledged by
Newt Gingrich during the 2012 campaign. “One of the real changes that comes
when you start running for President – as opposed to being an analyst on Fox –
is I have to actually know what I'm talking about,” he said. “It's a severe
limitation,” Gingrich added. 50
It is widely known among public relations professionals that Fox
has an “enemies list” of people who are not permitted to be interviewed on the
network. All proposed guests are vetted by senior executives and banned if they
have criticized Fox or hold views likely to rile its conservative viewers.
Media reporter Jim Romenesko has documented many cases of Fox blacklisting. 51 I know for a fact
that I am banned from Fox and blogger Andrew Sullivan and others have told me
that they are, too. When I mentioned this publicly once, a Washington Post
reporter looked into it and confirmed that I am indeed blacklisted. 52 Until my book
critical of George W. Bush was published, I appeared on Fox regularly.
46
Patrick C. Meirick, “Motivated Misperception? Party, Education, Partisan News,
and Belief in ‘Death Panels,’” Journalism
& Mass Communication Quarterly,
90:1 (March 2013): 39-57. The Tampa Bay Times labeled “death panels” its
“lie of the year” in 2009. See Angie Drobnic Holan, “PolitiFact’s Lie of
the Year: ‘Death Panels,’” PolitiFact
(December 18, 2009).
47
Reece Peck, “’You Say Rich, I Say Job Creator,’: How Fox News Framed the Great
Recession Through the Moral Discourse of Producerism,” Media,
Culture & Society,
36:4 (May 2014): 526-35.
48 Brian
Stetler, “At Fox News, Less Attention Paid to Gun Debate Than Elsewhere,” New York Times
(April 19, 2013).
50 “Newt
Gingrich on Fox News: ‘I Have to ‘Know What I’m Talking About’ Now that I’m Not
on Network,” Huffington
Post (November 30, 2011).
52 Greg
Sargent, “Publicist Confirms It: Fox News Banned Book Critical of George W.
Bush,” Washington
Post (November 28,
2012).
Fox Viewers Misinformed
A number of surveys have
found Fox viewers to be less well informed and more likely to have factually
untrue beliefs than those who receive their news from mainstream sources. A
2003 University of Maryland study compiled a list of 9 misperceptions about the
Iraq war, such as there being a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda and the
existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, neither of which were true,
and asked people which of these misperceptions they believed. Fox viewers were
more likely to be misinformed than those getting their news elsewhere.
Table 3
Iraq Misperceptions Based on
Primary News Source, 2003
Statement | Fox | CBS | NBC | CNN | ABC | Media | PBS/NPR |
Is it your impression that the US has | |||||||
or has not found clear evidence in Iraq | |||||||
that Saddam Hussein was working | |||||||
closely with the al-Qaeda terrorist | 67 | 56 | 49 | 48 | 45 | 40 | 16 |
organization? Percent incorrectly | |||||||
saying yes. | |||||||
Since the war with Iraq ended, is it | |||||||
your impression that the US has or has | |||||||
not found Iraqi weapons of mass | 33 | 23 | 20 | 20 | 19 | 17 | 11 |
destruction? Percent incorrectly | |||||||
saying yes. | |||||||
A follow-up study in 2010
questioned people about misperceptions related to domestic issues. Again, Fox
viewers were more likely to be misinformed and hold incorrect views than those
primarily getting their information elsewhere. As the study found:
Those
who watched Fox News almost daily were significantly more likely than those who
never watched it to believe that:
•
most economists estimate the stimulus
caused job losses (8 points more likely)
•
most economists have estimated the health
care law will worsen the deficit (31 points)
•
the
economy is getting worse (26 points)
•
most
scientists do not agree that climate change is occurring (30 points)
•
the
stimulus legislation did not include any tax cuts (14 points)
53 “Misperceptions,
the Media and the Iraq War,” Program on
International Policy Attitudes,
University of Maryland (October 2, 2003). See also Steven Kull, Clay Ramsay and
Evan Lewis, “Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War,” Political
Science Quarterly,
118:4 (Winter 2003): 569-98.
•
the
auto bailout only occurred under Obama (13 points)
•
when
TARP came up for a vote most Republicans opposed it (12 points)
•
and that it is not clear that Obama was
born in the United States (31 points)
These effects increased incrementally with
increasing levels of exposure and all were statistically significant. The
effect was also not simply a function of partisan bias, as people who voted
Democratic and watched Fox News were also more likely to have such
misinformation than those who did not watch it – though by a lesser margin than
those who voted Republican. 54
A 2011 survey found that Fox viewers were much more likely to be
ill-informed about the Affordable Care Act than those of CNN or MSNBC. People
were asked 10 questions about the legislation. Fox viewers tended to get more
of them wrong.
Table 4
Statements About the Health Law (percent)
   | Low scorers | Moderate scorers | High scorers |
Information source | 0-4 correct | 5-6 correct | 7-10 correct |
CNN | 27 | 39 | 35 |
Fox | 36 | 40 | 25 |
MSNBC | 24 | 36 | 39 |
Another 2011 survey by the Public Religion Institute found that
Fox viewers were more likely to believe that whites are as discriminated
against as members of minority groups and to hold silly and bigoted views
toward Muslims.
54 “Misinformation
and the 2010 Election,” University of Maryland, Program on
International Policy
Attitudes (December 10,
2010): 20.
55 “Pop
Quiz: Assessing Americans’ Familiarity with the Health Care Law,” Kaiser Family Foundation
(February 2011).
Discrimination Against Whites Now
as Big a
Problem as Minority Group
Discrimination
(percent)
Group | Agree | Disagree | ||||||||||
Most Trust Public Television | 23 | 75 | ||||||||||
Blacks | 29 | 68 | ||||||||||
Hispanics | 30 | 66 | ||||||||||
Democrats | 36 | 62 | ||||||||||
Millennials (18-29) | 44 | 54 | ||||||||||
Independents | 45 | 52 | ||||||||||
General Public | 46 | 51 | ||||||||||
Seniors (65+) | 51 | 46 | ||||||||||
Whites | 51 | 46 | ||||||||||
Republicans | 60 | 40 | ||||||||||
Tea Party | 63 | 36 | ||||||||||
Most Trust Fox News | 68 | 31 | ||||||||||
Source: Public Religion | Institute | 56 | ||||||||||
Table 6 | ||||||||||||
Attitudes Toward American Muslims by Trusted Media Source | ||||||||||||
(percent) | ||||||||||||
Broadcast | General | |||||||||||
Statement | Fox | News | CNN | MSNBC | PBS | Public | ||||||
Muslims want to establish Sha’ria | ||||||||||||
law. | 52 | 28 | 20 | 29 | 23 | 30 | ||||||
American Muslims NOT important | ||||||||||||
part of U.S. religious community. | 60 | 35 | 41 | 36 | 29 | 43 | ||||||
Values of Islam are at odds with | ||||||||||||
American values. | 68 | 45 | 37 | 39 | 37 | 47 | ||||||
Source: Public Religion Institute57 | ||||||||||||
Also in 2011, Farleigh
Dickinson University surveyed New Jersey residents on their knowledge of
various foreign and domestic issues in the news. It found that Fox viewers were
consistently more likely to have an incorrect understanding than those getting
their news elsewhere. As the study found:
People who watch Fox
News, the most popular of the 24-hour cable news networks, are 18-points less
likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government than those who watch
no news at all (after controlling for other news sources, partisanship,
education and other demographic factors). Fox News
56
Robert P. Jones et al., “What It Means
To Be An American,” Public
Religion Institute (September
6, 2011): 9.
watchers are also
6-points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their
government than those who watch no news.
“Because of the controls for partisanship,
we know these results are not just driven by Republicans or other groups being
more likely to watch Fox News,” said Dan Cassino, a professor of political
science at Fairleigh Dickinson and an analyst for the PublicMind Poll. “Rather,
the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads
people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at
all.” 58
A
follow-up poll in 2012 asked New Jersey residents 4 questions about domestic
and foreign policy issues in the news. Again, Fox viewers were more likely to
answer incorrectly. Said the report:
The study concludes that media sources
have a significant impact on the number of questions that people were able to
answer correctly. The largest effect is that of Fox News: all else being equal,
someone who watched only Fox News would be expected to answer just 1.04
domestic questions correctly — a figure which is significantly worse than if
they had reported watching no media at all. On the other hand, if they listened
only to NPR, they would be expected to answer 1.51 questions correctly; viewers
of Sunday morning talk shows fare similarly well. And people watching only “The
Daily Show with Jon Stewart” could answer about 1.42 questions correctly. 59
A
2015 Farleigh Dickinson national poll again found that Republicans and Fox viewers
were more likely to be misinformed about factual matters relating to public
policy such as the false beliefs that there were weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq and that Barack Obama is not a citizen of the United States.
59 “What
You Know Depends on What You Watch: Current Events Knowledge Across Popular
News Sources,” Farleigh
Dickinson University (May 3, 2012). Note: the Daily Show is a
satirical program, not straight news.
American Forces Found an Active
Weapons of Mass Destruction Program In Iraq
(percent)
Definitely | Probably | Probably | Definitely | Don’t | |
true | true | not true | not true | know/refused | |
Party | |||||
Republicans | 14 | 37 | 22 | 18 | 9 |
Democrats | 8 | 24 | 24 | 38 | 7 |
Independents | 8 | 38 | 21 | 21 | 12 |
Total | 11 | 31 | 23 | 26 | 10 |
Primary news | |||||
source | |||||
CNN | 12 | 29 | 23 | 28 | 8 |
Fox | 18 | 34 | 26 | 15 | 8 |
MSNBC | 2 | 12 | 24 | 55 | 7 |
Daily Show | 11 | 20 | 37 | 28 | 5 |
Table 8
President Obama Is Not Legally a
Citizen of the United States
(percent)
Definitely | Probably | Probably | Definitely | Don’t | |
true | true | not true | not true | know/refused | |
Party | |||||
Republicans | 10 | 24 | 27 | 30 | 9 |
Democrats | 3 | 4 | 14 | 75 | 4 |
Independents | 6 | 16 | 20 | 46 | 12 |
Total | 6 | 13 | 21 | 51 | 8 |
Primary news | |||||
source | |||||
CNN | 4 | 9 | 20 | 62 | 5 |
Fox | 11 | 19 | 30 | 30 | 10 |
MSNBC | 2 | 5 | 5 | 81 | 7 |
Daily Show | 5 | 11 | 11 | 72 | 1 |
Source: Farleigh Dickinson University61 | |||||
Fox Peddles Propaganda
A number of Fox competitors and others
have charged that Fox long ago ceased being anything remotely akin to an
objective news source and now functions basically as a propaganda arm of the
Republican Party.
•
CNN president Jeff Zucker told the
Television Critics Association in 2014, “The Republican Party is being run out
of News Corp. headquarters masquerading as a cable news channel.”62
•
Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein:
“It’s a real mistake to call Fox a conservative channel. It’s not. It’s a
partisan channel…. To begin with, bluntly, Fox is part of the Republican Party.
American political parties are made up of both formal organizations (such as
the RNC) and informal networks. Fox News Channel, then, is properly understood
as part of the expanded Republican Party.”63
•
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas
Ricks: “I think the emphasis on Benghazi [on Fox] has been extremely political,
partly because Fox is operating as the wing of the Republican Party.”64
•
Former New York Times executive
editor Howell Raines: “For the first time since the yellow journalism of a
century ago, the United States has a major news organization devoted to the
promotion of one political party.”65
•
Former George W. Bush press secretary
Scott McClellan said that Fox’s evening commentators received White House
talking points that were often used to get the White House message out. But the
Fox people really didn’t need them because they were already on board with its
point of view and gave the White House “its desired results,” in McClellan’s
words.66
•
In
2013, Fox staff hand-delivered to Capitol Hill video of a Fox News report on
food
stamp abuse while
Congress was debating a sharp cut in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance
Program. 67
In
the wake of a rare Fox apology for the extreme anti-Muslim views of one of its
contributors, which were widely ridiculed in the European press, Pulitzer
Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. of the Miami Herald said of
the news channel:
In America, it has come to seem normal
that a major news organization functions as the propaganda arm of an extremist
political ideology, that it spews a constant stream of racism, sexism,
homophobia, Islamophobia, paranoia and manufactured outrage, and that it does
so with brazen disregard for what is factual, what is right,
64 Quoted
in “Thomas Ricks Accuses Fox News of ‘Operating as a Wing of the Republican
Party,’” Huffington
Post (November 27, 2012).
65 Howell
Raines, “Why Don’t Honest Journalists Take on Roger Ailes and Fox News?” Washington
Post (March 14,
2010).
66 Matt
Corley, “McClellan: Fox News Commentators Use the ‘Talking Points’ that the
White House Sends Them,” ThinkProgress
(July 26, 2008).
what is fair, what is balanced — virtues that are
supposed to be the sine qua non of anything calling itself a newsroom. 68
Downsides for
Republicans
Although
this arrangement unquestionably aids Republicans in winning elections and votes
in Congress, it is not without its downsides. One is that Fox now exercises
such powerful control over the GOP that it has become the party’s kingmaker in
presidential primaries. 69 Indeed, during the 2012 election cycle, a number of
aspirants for the Republican nomination had been paid Fox commentators,
including Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee. 70 And woe to the
Republican who runs afoul of Fox’s top brass or ignores their advice, as Mitt
Romney did on one occasion in 2012. 71 Fox is now so important in GOP primaries that
candidates must put aside pressing campaign concerns when summoned to a Fox
interview, where any error is magnified within the Republican bubble. 72
Gingrich
complained that Fox opted in favor of Mitt Romney early on. “I think Fox has
been for Romney all the way through,” Gingrich said behind closed doors in
April 2012. “In our experience, Callista [Newt’s wife] and I both believe CNN
is less biased than Fox this year. We are more likely to get neutral coverage
out of CNN than we are of Fox, and we’re more likely to get distortion out of
Fox. That’s just a fact.” 73
In
2015, however, Romney found himself on the wrong side of the Fox News primary,
when Rupert Murdoch turned thumbs down on his candidacy. As the New York
Times reported, “It is hard to recall a display of animus as unsubtle as
the one Mr. Murdoch and corners of his media empire have unleashed on Mr.
Romney in the past few weeks as he has tried to build support for a third
presidential run.” 74
Romney soon dropped out of the 2016 race.
14,
2010); Paul Farhi, “Despite Kingmaking Expectations, Fox News Seems Neutral
Among GOP Field,” Washington
Post (December 30, 2011); Bob Woodward, “Fox Chief
Proposed Patraeus Campaign,” Washington
Post (December 4, 2012).
70
Jonathan Martin and Keach Hagey, “Fox Primary: Complicated, Contractual,” Politico (September 27, 2010).
71 Jeremy
Peters, “Shots By Murdoch at Romney Play Out to Conservative Core,” New York Times
(July 6, 2012).
72 Alessandra
Stanley, “The Republican Primary Campaign in Iowa Is Right at Home on Fox
News,” New York
Times (December 10, 2011).
73 Quoted
in Scott Conroy, “Gingrich Unloads on Fox News in Private Meeting,” Real Clear Politics
(April 12, 2012).
74 Amy
Chozick and Michael Barbaro, “Again for Murdoch, Romney Can Do No Right,” New York Times
(January 27, 2015).
Another problem is that Republican voters get so much
of their news from Fox, which cheerleads whatever their candidates are doing or
saying, that they suffer from wishful thinking and fail to see that they may
not be doing as well as they imagine, or that their ideas are not connecting
outside the narrow party base. As a recent academic study found:
Exposure to programs featured on Fox News,
such as those hosted by Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, resulted in a greater
wishful thinking effect by Romney supporters. In other words, while Romney
supporters were substantially more likely to predict their candidate would win
the 2012 presidential election, watching Fox News programming exacerbated this
effect. 75
It
may be that some Republican Fox viewers became complacent and didn’t work as
hard as they might if they had been more aware of how badly Romney was doing in
the final days of the campaign.
Fox
viewers also lack an early-warning system when Republican ideas aren’t
resonating outside the party. For example, in 2012 Fox often repeated Romney’s
claim that 47 percent of Americans paid no income taxes and were dependent on
government. 76
This claim hurt him badly in the election.
Similarly,
when Republican candidates spend so much time on Fox, to the exclusion of other
media, they lack the skill to deal with questions from non-friendly, more
skeptical journalists. They even get tripped up on Fox when a mildly
penetrating question is asked, as happened to Jeb Bush in early 2015 when he
was asked if he would have gone to war in Iraq – an obvious question that he
fumbled because support for the Iraq invasion is taken as given on Fox. 77
Conservative
Blowback
Consequently,
some political observers now question whether Fox is a net plus or a net minus
for Republican presidential candidates. As Columbia University political
scientist Lincoln Mitchell put it after Romney’s loss:
Fox has now become a problem for the
Republican Party because it keeps a far right base mobilized and angry, making
it hard for the party to move to the center or increase its appeal, as it must
do to remain electorally competitive….One of the reasons Mitt Romney was so
unable to pivot back to the center was due to the drumbeat at Fox, which
contributed to forcing him to the right during the primary
75 Barry
A. Hollander, “The Surprised Loser: The Role of Electoral Expectations and News
Media Exposure in Satisfaction with Democracy,” Journalism
& Mass Communication
Quarterly, 91:4 (December 2014): 651-68.
76 Eric
Boehlert, “The Uncomfortable Truth About the Political Nature of Fox News,” Media Matters for
America (May 27, 2015).
season. Even after the
primary season, when Fox became a big supporter for Romney, the rift between
official editorial position and the political feelings of Fox viewers and hosts
was clear. 78
In
2010, fear of a negative reaction on Fox led several Republican senators to
abandon efforts to deal with global climate change. One of them, Sen. Lindsey
Graham of South Carolina, warned the others that work had to be completed
quickly before Fox News got wind of it. “The second they focus on us,” Graham
said, “it’s gonna be all cap-and-tax all the time, and it’s gonna become just a
disaster for me on the airwaves.” 79
In
May 2015, a number of Republicans were concerned about the impact of Fox on
their party when it was announced that the new channel would host the first
Republican presidential debate of the 2016 race, and that participation would
be limited to just 10 candidates, based on polls, although many more are
running and considered serious candidates.
Former
Congressman Ron Paul, who ran for the GOP nomination in both 2008 and 2012,
said that Fox decided early on to torpedo his race in 2007 by disinviting him
to the GOP debate two days before it was to take place. Paul, whose son Senator
Rand Paul is running for the 2016 GOP nomination, charges that Fox manipulates
the nominating process for its own commercial benefit. Ron Paul says:
I mean it’s sort of like, why do the
candidates roll over and abide by the rules of some commercial organization
that has an agenda? And Fox certainly has a very powerful agenda, so who knows
the rating. I know that even on their polling after the debates, I usually won
all the polling, but they would say, well there’s a mistake and they would
ignore it, so I don’t like the idea that somebody like Fox has sort of monopoly
control of how a debate will be run. 80
Former
George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum perhaps put the complicated,
double-edged relationship between Fox and the GOP best when he said,
“Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we're
discovering we work for Fox. And this balance here has been completely
reversed. The thing that sustains a strong Fox network is the thing that undermines
a strong Republican party.” 81
Of
course, Fox’s sins are not its alone. Fox is part of a conservative universe in
which many conservatives now live, getting all of their information from
conservatives sources – Fox News,
78
Lincoln Mitchell, “Is Fox Even Helping the Republicans Anymore?” Huffington
Post (November 29,
2012).
talk radio, conservative publications and web sites. 82 This is often
called a “bubble” or “echo chamber” that reinforces marginally held views until
they become doctrinaire and imposes false views on those exposed to no other
viewpoint. 83
In effect, conservatives engage in self-brainwashing, where certain ideas are
repeated so often and with no contrary or alternative point of view that it
fulfills the classic definition of brainwashing. 84
Conservative
critics of this argument, such as Rush Limbaugh, implicitly confirm it by
saying that no conservative needs to know anything other than what he tells
them to get all the news they need. Every aspect of liberalism any conservative
needs to know is explained by him in such a way that they will understand how
wrong it is without ever having to check a liberal source for themselves. As
Limbaugh said in reaction to an earlier version of this study:
You who listen to this program learn more
about liberalism on this program than you would reading Politico or than
you will reading the New York Times’ cause it takes me to interpret it
for you. My point is, you who listen to this program hear much more about liberalism
philosophically and what it is and how to recognize it and how to spot it and
how to defeat it.
You learn that on this program, where
supposedly you only come here to hear what you want to hear. You only come here
to hear what you know to be true. You only come here to be validated. You're
not interested. You're living in a bubble. You don't care what happens outside
of what you think. That's absurd! You cannot listen to this program and only
know what conservatism is, because the way conservatism is explained on this
program is as a bounce-off, if you will, to liberalism. 85
To that I say, quod
erat demonstrandum.
82
Robert H. Wicks, Jan L. Wicks and Shauna A. Morimoto, “Partisan Media Selective
Exposure During the 2012 Presidential Election,” American
Behavioral Scientist,
58:9 (August 2014): 1131-43.
83 Lorien
Jasny, Joseph Waggle and Dana R. Fisher, “An Empirical Examination of Echo
Chambers in US Climate Policy Networks,” Nature Climate Change,
forthcoming.
84 Edgar
H. Schein, “The Chinese Indoctrination Program for Prisoners of War: A Study of
Attempted ‘Brainwashing,’” Psychiatry:
Interpersonal and Biological Processes, 19:2 (1956):
149-72.
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