September 8, 2017

Without Fox News, Republicans Would Be In a World of Hurt

A couple of years ago I wrote about an NBER study showing that Fox News induces people to vote Republican. Not too surprising. But now this study is finally being published, so it’s getting renewed attention. Are there any differences between the old and new versions? Well, there’s this:

Old paper: Were a viewer initially at the ideology of the median Democratic voter in 2008 to watch an hour of Fox per week, her likelihood of voting Republican would increase by just over 15 percentage points.

New paper: Were a viewer initially at the ideology of the median Democratic voter in 2008 to watch an additional 3 minutes of Fox News per week, her likelihood of voting Republican would increase by 1.03 percentage points.

Hours have turned into minutes. That’s about it. The basic results stay the same, as illustrated here in colorful chart form:

In 2008, John McCain won 45.7 percent of the popular vote. This paper is therefore suggesting that if Fox News didn’t exist, he would have won only 39.4 percent of the vote. That would have been quite the epic shellacking for a two-person race, right up there with Barry Goldwater and Alf Landon.

This seems a little excessive. For one thing, if the numbers were really that high it implies that Democrats would have occupied the White House continuously since 1992 if only Fox News had never existed. I’m not sure anyone buys that.

Still, even if the effect isn’t this big, other studies have confirmed that Fox News has a clear effect on voting while liberal outlets like MSNBC don’t. This means we can thank Fox News for both the Iraq War and Donald Trump. We can also thank them for their decades-long effort to weaponize the aggrieved white vote. Thanks, Fox News!

POSTSCRIPT: Why the focus on presidential races? There’s a lot more data available for House races, and it’s more geographically concentrated too. Somebody should do this kind of research to see how much effect Fox has on House and Senate races.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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