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An academic paper on the possible political effect of Fox News:

They find that the introduction of Fox News had a small but statistically significant effect on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996 and 2000. Republicans gained an estimate of between 0.4 and 0.7 percentage points in the towns that broadcast Fox News. They also find that Fox News had a significant effect on Senate vote share and on voter turnout. Their estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 8 percent of its viewers to vote Republican according to a first audience measure, and 11 to 28 percent according to a second, more restrictive audience measure.

The authors also analyzed whether Fox News affected voting in those races where it did not cover the candidates directly, as was the case in most Senate races. In that way, they are able to estimate whether the influence of Fox News is candidate-specific or whether it extends to general political beliefs. The researchers find that Fox News significantly increased the Republican vote share for Senate, by 0.8 percentage points. Additionally, the effect was not larger for the one Senatorial race that Fox News did cover heavily, the New York state race between Hillary Clinton and Rick Lazio. Fox News appears to have induced a generalized ideological shift.

I haven't seen any commentary about this paper anywhere, but I have no doubt that the Left will use it to try to prove that Fox is Right-biased. Fine -- but such a comment suggests, as this paper seems to, that Fox is uniquely biased. As the late entrant into the 24-hour cable news game, Fox suffers from being uniquely able to be studied by academics looking for marginal effects -- such studies, by their very nature, treating the status quo ante as a neutral backdrop. What if Fox had been first -- and what if television news had been generally Right-biased as, in fact, it was Left-biased -- and CNN the new entrant? Then no doubt we would see in the study's results an influence to the Left.

Thanks to Jameson Campaigne for the link.

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