My
erstwhile political science partner
at Duke, Christopher Gelpi, has written a fascinating paper
analyzing how the public's views on war vary depending on what they view on
television. He has reached some interesting conclusions which, if correct, suggest
that President Obama may be more beholden to Fox News than he might like.
Using
a survey that interviewed Americans in September/October 2008, Gelpi analyzed
the viewpoints of the general public grouped according to whether they got
their news primarily from Fox News, from MSNBC, from Comedy Central, or from
other sources. (Why Comedy Central, you might ask? Because when you hang around
college students you run into a surprising number who get the lion's share of
their current events from watching The Daily Show and Colbert Report.)
Gelpi finds, not surprisingly, that there is a powerful selection effect going
on. Fox News and MSNBC report the news in very different ways and the public
naturally gravitates towards the news outlet most congenial to their worldview;
conservatives and Republicans flock to Fox News and liberals and Democrats
flock to MSNBC and Comedy Central.
What he set out to assess, however, was something more nuanced: whether there
was anything beyond this selection effect at work -- whether being a Fox News
(or MSNBC) watcher made someone more inclined towards the viewpoint offered on
that channel than that person would have been without watching it. The only way
to settle this dispositively would be through a complex and coercive
experiment: locking subjects in the room for months at a time and forcing them
to watch different doses of the news. Such random assignment experimental
trials are the gold standard in research on human subjects but for obvious
reasons they aren't viable for most of the things we study in my corner of
political science. (But as my FP colleague Dan Drezner can attest, professors
sometimes dream up such schemes, usually over late night beers at professional
conferences.)
To get around this limitation, Gelpi uses a sophisticated statistical technique
called "matching" that compares the Fox News watchers in his sample to other
respondents who match the Fox News folks in many, many respects (age, gender,
religious views, political ideology, etc.) except the crucial one that they do
not watch Fox News; the same sort of analyses are done on MSNBC watchers and
Comedy Central watchers. He then compares the attitudes of those paired groups
on the crucial question of support for the Afghan and Iraq wars.
He finds that MSNBC and Comedy Central watchers are no less likely to oppose
the wars than their matched profile counterparts who happen not to watch those
channels. Inference: Watching MSNBC and Comedy Central does not appear to make
folks less supportive of the wars than they already were, which was not
very. However, Fox News watchers were more supportive of the wars than
their otherwise matched counterparts who did not watch Fox News. Inference:
watching Fox News does appear to make folks more supportive of the wars.
There are other possible explanations that need further analysis before Gelpi
can know for sure. Perhaps there is some hitherto unidentified feature that
distinguishes Fox News watchers from their matched counterparts that explains
who watches what and also explains attitudes on the wars; in other words,
perhaps it is just selection effects after all and Gelpi has not yet identified
all the factors driving the selection. Or perhaps the greater diversity of the
Fox News audience makes them more open to persuasion. The audience for MSNBC
and Comedy Central is not just small but also quite narrow, whereas the
audience for Fox News is not just much larger but also quite diverse; a
surprisingly high number of Democrats, for instance, watch Fox News.
But if Gelpi's inferences are correct and durable, then he expects over time a
cumulative "echo chamber" effect with views hardening and polarizing. The
implications for President Obama and support for his wars are intriguing. Despite
Obama's obvious antipathy toward Fox News, Gelpi's research suggests that the president's best chance at mobilizing public support may involve reaching out
to Fox viewers. Gelpi's research is not dispositive on this point because his
data is from 2008, before Obama took office. But it is a subject worth studying
further and, I would venture to say, a subject worth discussing in the White
House.
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