The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting
Stefano DellaVigna
UC Berkeley and NBER
Ethan Kaplan
IIES, Stockholm University
Does media bias affect voting? We analyze the entry of Fox News in cable markets and its impact on voting. Between October 1996 and November 2000, the conservative Fox News Channel was introduced in the cable programming of 20 percent of U. S. towns. Fox News availability in 2000 appears to be largely idiosyncratic, conditional on a set of controls. Using a data set of voting data for 9,256 towns, we investigate if Republicans gained vote share in towns where Fox News entered the cable market by the year 2000. We find a significant effect of the introduction of Fox News on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996 and 2000. Republicans gained 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns that broadcast Fox News. Fox News also affected voter turnout and the Republican vote share in the Senate. Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 28 percent of its viewers to vote Republican, depending on the audience measure. The Fox News effect could be a temporary learning effect for rational voters, or a permanent effect for nonrational voters subject to persuasion.
P.S. I do remember the conclusion in <Freakonomics> written by Steven D. Levitt and Steven J. Dubner that was on the basis of lots of election campaign data was “what really matters for a political candidate in not how much you spend; what matters is who you are”. In another word, money cannot buy election, which is in sharp contrast to the truism. As we know, every channel in America has his own stand, conservative or liberal, Demecratic or Republican. The money for campaign does not affact Fox News or other news channels? I really have no idea about what the campaign money goes for.