Shhhhhhsh! it’s secret, but you really can’t believe everything you read on the Internet! Even so, there seems to be hope. Okay, the study is 126 pages long, and it’s a preprint, which means it hasn’t gone through the (presumably) rigid review that’s performed on every scientific study before it’s published in a scientific journal. And, although a heretofore reliable source (John 8:32) said “… you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free,” the budget for the truth comes to $15/hour. Still, the study offers grounds for hope.
Actually, it is rather important to know where the truth is. Repeat something often enough, loudly enough, and it begins to be believable. The late Senator Robert Dole, who had been Republican nominee for president, said of the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry, “Not every one of these people can be Republican liars. There’s got to be some truth to the charges.” Actually they could – if it established them as members of a group – but that’s a psychological study for another time. The point is, you have to know where to look for the truth.
Fortunately, the librarians at Pierce College in Los Angeles did a remarkable job of evaluating a number of new sources and rating them along a spectrum from “Liberal Utter Garbage” to “Conservative Utter Garbage” with “hyper partisan” on each side, and a sweet spot in the middle. The best sources in their opinion include the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, BBC and news from the major networks. (https://library.piercecollege.edu/ld.php?content_id=27587535). USA Today and CNN were unbiased but simplistic and got a note “better than not reading news at all.”
The depth of reporting is also rated from “sensational” to “complex”. Slate, The Atlantic and Vox were complex liberal while The Economist and Wall Street Journal were complex conservative. All were considered somewhat slanted but were rated “great in-depth sources of news.”
The study that makes a potential difference is titled “The manifold effects of partisan media on viewers’ beliefs and attitudes: A field experiment with Fox News viewers,” from UC Berkeley and Yale. (https://osf.io/jrw26/). It was funded by the National Science Foundation and Yale. While preprints are notoriously unreliable, this was a fairly simple study. It was an attempt to gauge the impact of partisan media on voting behavior and what happens when the source of news changes. Pew Research has reported that Republicans prefer Fox by a wide margin. While liberals favor a number of news sources, Republicans trust Fox above all others, with the level of trust growing with greater conservatism. Possibly worse, the closest on the conservative trust list for 2020 were Hannity and Limbaugh (who died in 2021), not news reporters but commentators.
The study was conducted by recruiting 763 participants, nearly all very conservative and strong Republicans. They were divided into a study group and a control group. Study group group participants were paid $15 per hour to watch up to seven hours of CNN per week during September 2020, prioritizing the hours at which participants indicated they typically watched Fox News. Compliance was measured with quizzes about the content of the CNN show, such as which guest had just appeared. Compliance was high; most participants got almost all the questions right.
It would be nice to say that exposure to news rather than propaganda made a real difference, but Greta Van Susteren spent 14 years at Fox before going to MSNBC and Shepard Smith gave Fox 23 years. Still, the limited exposure to CNN did make a small but measurable difference. The greatest change was increased approval of voting by mail, but there was also a slight diminution in regard for Donald Trump. Perhaps most of all, the people who watched CNN began to realize that Fox wasn’t telling the whole story. Now that we know that the truth can make a difference, the question becomes how to deliver the message at an affordable price.
Sam Uretsky is a writer and pharmacist living in Louisville, Ky. Email sdu01@outlook.com.
From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2022
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