Perceptions of Partisanship in Local Television News

People turn to local media for information during crises such as the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19). What factors impact media consumers’ decisions about which local television news broadcast to watch? This study argues that media consumers infer the partisanship of local television affiliates — judging local Fox and NBC news broadcasts to be right and left slanted, respectively, based on their perceived associations with Fox News and MSNBC. Using the results from a representative survey of Americans (N = 5,461), the study demonstrates that local Fox and NBC viewers are significantly more likely to watch Fox News or MSNBC. As a result, watching local Fox is associated with less coronavirus risk because media consumers choose local Fox believing that it will align with their existing conservative views. This study demonstrates the importance of the perceptions of local news partisanship in influencing the consumption of critically important local crisis news.

Frontiers: The Persuasive Effect of Fox News: Noncompliance with Social Distancing During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Cable news channels—and Fox News in particular—affected the extent to which viewers’ complied with experts’ social distancing guidelines early on in the COVID-19 pandemic.

What is Fox News? Partisan Journalism, Misinformation, and the Problem of Classification

Fox News is one of the most popular news sources in the United States. Yet, there are those who reject the idea that Fox should be considered a news source in the first place, claiming it should be considered something more akin to propaganda. This article uses the ambiguity surrounding Fox News’ classification as an opportunity to explore how news sources get defined and categorized within journalism research and practice. It discusses three approaches that can be utilized to understand and categorize partisan media—producer-focused, audience-focused, and critical/normative. It explores the benefits and limitations of these perspectives and the need for scholarly inquiry that transverses and synthesizes them. We argue that an increasingly variegated news landscape calls for scholars to develop a richer vocabulary for distinguishing key features of partisan news outlets and greater reflexivity in research design that acknowledges the challenges inherent in translating meaning and values between producers, audiences, and scholars.

When election expectations fail: Polarized perceptions of election legitimacy increase with accumulating evidence of election outcomes and with polarized media

The present study, conducted immediately after the 2020 presidential election in the United States, examined whether Democrats’ and Republicans’ polarized assessments of election legitimacy increased over time. In a naturalistic survey experiment, people (N = 1,236) were randomly surveyed either during the week following Election Day, with votes cast but the outcome unknown, or during the following week, after President Joseph Biden was widely declared the winner. The design unconfounded the election outcome announcement from the vote itself, allowing more precise testing of predictions derived from cognitive dissonance theory. As predicted, perceived election legitimacy increased among Democrats, from the first to the second week following Election Day, as their expected Biden win was confirmed, whereas perceived election legitimacy decreased among Republicans as their expected President Trump win was disconfirmed. From the first to the second week following Election Day, Republicans reported stronger negative emotions and weaker positive emotions while Democrats reported stronger positive emotions and weaker negative emotions. The polarized perceptions of election legitimacy were correlated with the tendencies to trust and consume polarized media. Consumption of Fox News was associated with lowered perceptions of election legitimacy over time whereas consumption of other outlets was associated with higher perceptions of election legitimacy over time. Discussion centers on the role of the media in the experience of cognitive dissonance and the implications of polarized perceptions of election legitimacy for psychology, political science, and the future of democratic society.

Internet Comments as Delegitimization-Driven Discourse (a Case Study of the Fox News Materials on the Political Actions of the U.S. President Joe Biden)

The article introduces delegitimization as a macro-strategy of non-professional political discourse. The author studied comments on the site of the American Fox News to analyze the strategy of rational pessimism chosen by its readers as recipients of political news about the new president of the United States Joe Biden. The delegitimization discourse in the genre of Internet comments to political news proved to combine rational text production, emotional message, and an appeal to universal values. The strategy of rational pessimism manifested itself in the ideologies of the crises of democracy and presidential power. These cognitive-discursive units were actualized by both the broad extralinguistic context, i.e. the current political situation, and the immediate context, i.e. the publication aimed at discrediting Biden’s policy. The commentators' arguments about problems in the sphere of politics, economics, and business determined the interdiscursive nature of communication. While expressing pessimistic moods and negative attitude to the political actions of the U.S.President and the Democratic Party, the commentators appealed to the value categories of personal and state security.

Can the Neoliberal Subject Condemn [Him]self?: Locating Masculinity at FOX News in Bombshell

Director Jay Roach’s 2019 film Bombshell draws on a series of real-life sexual allegations against FOX News founder Roger Ailes, depicting the climate in the newsroom and portraying a number of FOX personalities. As a film marketed for mass audiences, it is crucial to question the extent to which the film successfully serves to critique sexism in the FOX News newsroom. The purpose of this paper is thus to examine the portrayal of masculinity and sexism and FOX News in Bombshell. To explore the dynamic of this newsroom, this paper centers on interrogating Bombshell against the notion of a “feminist film”. I first attempt to analyze and locate gendered dynamics within Bombshell, then reflect on portrayed gendered dynamics with reference to the history of FOX News and the way competing masculinities work in the news organization. The FOX News newsroom is unique in the ways varying dynamics of gender manifest within its locale: in front of the camera, a kind of neoconservative “traditionalist” morality and gender order; behind the camera, an “amoral” gender dynamic that aligns with neoliberal free-market principles. I then explore how a gender order is upheld in contradiction, often by the very subjects who are subjected under a masculine-dominant gender order. I question the possibility of any future of gender egalitarianism at FOX News, and conclude by arguing that Bombshell misses the mark in interrogating a gender order, instead problematically framing sexism as chiefly upheld by individuals.

The Influence of Partisan Media in the Face of Global Pandemic: How News Media Influenced COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy

While vaccination against COVID-19 represents a clear path toward resuming “normal life,” attitudes toward vaccination and vaccine uptake has been highly politically contentious. In this paper, we investigate (1) whether or not partisan news outlets covered COVID-vaccination issues in different ways, and (2) whether differences in coverage contributed to the vaccine politicization. We do this by bringing together novel sentiment-scored COVID vaccine stories (N > 17,000) from cable and mainstream news outlets, N > 180,000 vaccine adverse event reports to the Dept. of Health and Human Services (which we validate both here and in past research as a proxy for public vaccine sentiment), and six original surveys (N = 6,499) measuring vaccination intentions and media use behavior throughout the pandemic. We find that Fox News’ vaccine-related coverage was significantly more negative than that of other cable and mainstream sources. Critically, these differences in tone influenced public opinion about vaccines. Adverse event reports tended to increase following heightened periods of negativity on Fox News, which robustness checks suggest is not likely to be a reverse causal effect. Correspondingly, self-reported Fox News exposure in the opinion data is associated with elevated levels of vaccine hesitancy throughout the pandemic. Collectively, the results provide new insights into the persuasive power of partisan media. While some might expect the promise of ending a global pandemic to interrupt conventional media effect processes, we find that differences in covered vaccine-related issues had both predictable and polarizing effects on public opinion.

Reliable Sources? Correcting Misinformation in Polarized Media Environments

Providing corrective information can reduce factual misperceptions among the public but it tends to have little effect on people’s underlying attitudes. Our study examines how the impact of misinformation corrections is moderated by media choice. In our experiment, participants are asked to read a news article published by Fox News or MSNBC, each highlighting the positive economic impact of legal immigration in the United States. While the news content is held constant, our treatment manipulates whether participants are allowed to freely choose a media outlet or are randomly assigned. Our results demonstrate the importance of people’s ability to choose: While factual misperceptions are easily corrected regardless of how people gained access to information, subsequent opinion change is conditional on people’s prior willingness to seek out alternative sources. As such, encouraging people to broaden their media diet may be more effective to combat misinformation than disseminating fact-checks alone.

“There’s No Way Abraham Lincoln Could Work at Google”: Fox News and the Politics of Breaking Up Big Tech

This paper analyzes a corpus of segments from the Tucker Carlson Tonight program concerning “big tech” (focusing specifically on Google) and contextualizes this analysis within the political history of American media and technology regulation. Conservatives have long lamented the so-called liberal bias in media, but have also traditionally supported business deregulation and an antitrust approach narrowly concerned with consumer welfare. The textual analysis of Fox segments first shows that recurring complaints about the bias of Google's employees and executives is connected with its market dominance, and they frequently position corporations rather than government as the central threat to freedom. The solutions discussed, correspondingly, often favor greater structural intervention in the market to mitigate concentration’s deleterious political consequences. I show how the critique on Carlson’s show and recent attention to the issue from the executive branch represent a new manifestation of the theory of ideological evolution that Jack Balkin has called “ideological drift,” in which a political idea (in this case, the “Brandeisian” approach to antitrust law) changes valence in different material circumstances and thus finds new proponents.