I feel pretty contrarian about this piece. In the same piece that talks about how dangerous it is and how regulation is needed because facebook has the ability to influence public opinion, they talk about how "totally normal" it is for the media to act as mouthpieces for whomever wants to pay. No mention of how Fox News can swing public opinion, and really needs to be unbiased and in fact needs regulation to that end. Or any number of other media. And then it includes a gif making fun of zuckerberg for being robotic while complaining about him writing a post that was human instead of corporate.
Comment talking about bias, only mentions Fox News. Welcome to hell (imo, this is what you get when you don't teach people how to argue and feed them too many Disney films).
No, the press shouldn't be regulated. Yes, bias is normal. No, Fox News doesn't "swing public opinion" (they reflect views that already exist, and pander to them). Life is difficult, you have to think for yourself.
You seem to be arguing two different things: first, Fox News does not influence public opinion; second, that it shouldn't matter if they do because adults should think for themselves.
The second is fundamentally a subject view of the world, so you are neither right nor wrong. I disagree with you strongly. We should be concerned about things that harm the our civic health even if we ourselves to blame for them. I think there's a clear parallel to our actual health: when 80% of our population is overweight or obese, it's maybe time to think beyond "adults are responsible for what they eat" and towards "the world would be better if we could make progress on this issue". Ditto our past history with smoking. We know that people are subject to persuasion and psychological manipulation and exploitation of their cognitive biases. A model of the world that has everyone as solely responsible for their own destiny is a pretty useless one, in my opinion.
But, your first claim -- "Fox News doesn't 'swing public opinion'" is an empirical one. Either it does or it doesn't. You're either right or wrong.
DellaVigna and Kaplan's 2007 piece in the Quarterly Journal of Economics investigates this question. They exploit the fact that the phased roll-out of Fox News between 1996 and 2000 impacted 20% of the country. This allows for a natural experiment where some markets are "treated" by Fox News and others are not.
Okay, so, first, should we believe this design? If the entry of Fox News into a market was random, then this is an experiment and we have a treatment effect. If the entry of Fox news into a market was conditional on market characteristics that we can assess, we have "selection on observables", and we can recover a treatment effect. We need only a good selection model. It is also the case that if entry into a market was non-random, but conditionally ignorable with respect to the potential outcomes of the market (e.g. random with respect to politics), we can get a treatment effect without knowing the full selection model. So we have some different routes to the answer here.
The answer is between #2 and #3 -- Fox News did enter markets in a non-random way, but not based on demographics or past voting history, based mainly on geographic considerations. Given the regulatory and infrastructural component of entering a new market, this is probably not surprising, but it does guard against "Fox entered conservative markets first" as a counterclaim.
Now, having clarified the design based considerations, the authors find that Fox News was responsible for a ~0.5 percent vote share increase in Republican vote share in the presidential election of 2000. Whether you consider that large or small depends on your frame of reference. My sense would be that 0.5 percent is small cosmically, but it's maybe possible that you could have an election where that kind of margin is decisive. Remind me again, was the 2000 election close?
This is a fairly credible and careful design published in a good journal and widely cited (1486 citations, which is quite high for a nonmethods economics paper). That doesn't make it true, but it does suggest that the field of Economics views this as an important paper and that it has been exposed to scrutiny from a wide variety of sources.
If there's a little contempt in my reply here, it's because I think your off-hand claim that media diet, priming, and framing effects are solely demand driven and have no actual impact on viewers seems to fly in the face of like 50 years of communications, economics, and political science research. In other words, it feels like your first reply was "50 years of research doesn't matter, humans aren't influenced by any of this stuff". Maybe that's not what you meant, but when I see someone flippantly respond without evidence, I think "Welcome to hell" -- imo, that's the kind of thing we get when we don't teach people to argue.
Understanding that everyone is biased is not a "stupid" opinion. It is reality. Thinking otherwise is certainly a very common belief, and quite "stupid" indeed (the hallmark of stupidity is thinking you are becoming more intelligent, the stupider you become).
First, I didn't say anything about whether it should matter whether Fox News does or doesn't influence public opinion. I don't have an opinion (that naturally depends on whether you think Fox News is "right" or "wrong").
Second, you confusion on personal choice is quite palpable. You can have concern about a topic but not take responsibility for that. Those are two very different statements because the latter begs the question: who takes responsibility? From the tone of your answer, the suggestion is "wise people like me" (as latter comments will find, modesty is not something that pervades your thinking). Great, that is the dictator's charter...and that is also not subjective (again, you are mostly confused about this topic).
Third, as you appear to understand the study that you quote is not an RCT. There is an unknown level of selection bias, you do not mention (unsurprisingly) whether this was overcome in the study. The study used differences-in-differences, this will overcome selection bias with some caveats.
Fourth, it says nothing about the mechanism for this process. Again, you are still assuming that persuasion works in the way you feel it works...but we know that voting behaviour is mostly determined by other factors, some of which weren't controlled for in the study. And you believe too, that because the election result was close this was the deciding factor? Another extraordinary assumption with no evidence.
Fifth, citations mean nothing. The only evidence on this subject is that people do not think clearly, academics are largely left-leaning and are subject to all the same biases as the rest of us. Sorry.
Sixth, there is not fifty years of research into this. This is the kind of lazy, exaggerated claim that people who have no knowledge of the area but with strong preconceptions often make. You seem to believe that you are hyper-rational, and that you only believe in things with evidence so end up making the completely false, bombastic claim that there is fifty years of research behind your claims. I will make this simple: you are talking to someone who has done postgrad work in politics, no such evidence exists. This isn't even something about which you can produce very solid research (#8). You can model voting behavior very well...but it includes no factors like exposure to Fox News.
Seventh, something that you need to understand is that there is no point arguing with people like yourself. It is actually far easier to get through to people who have no education. The absolute worst people in the world to argue with are people who believe they are educated (although often not about the relevant area) because they believe that there is evidence for their feelings. They do not believe they think irrationally but everyone does. My point about "Welcome to hell" is: bias occurs to everyone but is only applied to groups that the observer disagrees with...this kind of position never changes (and later in life, they come to think about people on the other side too).
Eighth, the view about Fox News affecting an election isn't subjective. It is something that we can produce knowledge on but it is fundamentally unknowable. It is important to think about this and understand why it is the case. Academics, particularly within economics, do not understand this and it has led to lots of pointless work.
Ninth, I would like to hear precisely how you discovered this paper. Was it something like: google "fox media bias" -> find paper confirming belief?
Tenth, you are looking at this subject in a very unproductive way (again, because you are biased...in fact, you almost entirely missed the point of what I said). Everything is biased. Other news stations in the US are biased. This has been going on for longer than the US has been a country (political pamphlets started appearing in the late 16th century). Most people are not going to think for themselves but that option has to be left open to them. I live in the UK, and we have had massive issues with this because certain media sources have started producing "fact-check" services...inevitably, we now spend as much time fact-checking the fact-checkers who largely produce news that is just as factually inaccurate (in my experience, it is often more inaccurate, ref #7). The only reason people get angry about this topic is because they view one side as wrong, and another side as right...rather than the reality which is both sides are biased equally (again, this is a fairly well-understood aspect of human nature...thinking otherwise is a sign of bias).
Friendly feedback: your point would have been 10x more effective without the opener. I maybe agree but it never matters what you say; it matters how it’s heard.
I don't care about effectiveness, 95% of people have no interest in reality in this subject, there is nothing that you can say that will change their thinking.
