(John Ransom, Headline USA) An academic study by David Brockman and Joshua Kalla found Fox News viewers who were paid to watch CNN modified their views over time and that modification could help democracy.
“We recruited a sample of regular Fox News viewers using data on actual TV viewership from a media company, and incentivized them to watch CNN instead for a month using real-time viewership quizzes,” said the study.
Calling the Fox News viewers a “treatment group,” as if they were patients, the study concluded that partisanship in the news media- which the study implied was primarily engaged in by Fox News- presented the GOP not just with an electoral advantage, but also was a challenge to “democratic accountability,” clearly calling for some sort of a solution to this challenge.
Time to shell out the money. I’m fucking serious. Do it. It’s the only way to move pass this mess. Then bill DT. If he doesn’t pay up, sue his ass for everything he’s got. https://t.co/SoI2Hi4iAZ
— J. Hicks 🇺🇦 (@lenixtweet) April 5, 2022
And this is exactly the red meat that liberals love.
“Brilliant & hilarious! Can #FoxNews viewers be deprogrammed? Paying them to watch CNN makes them less gullible,” tweeted Timothy Caulfield.
In short, the researchers produced a study that showed what countries that have a controlled news media already know: that if people are presented with only one set of facts, it affects their opinions, and that’s why totalitarian countries don’t allow alternate points of view.
A previous study conducted in 2008 by Scott Gehlbach and Konstantin Sonin, which contrasted media bias in Russia under the more moderate Boris Yeltsin and the dictator Vladimir Putin, pretty much concluded what the Brockman, et al. study found.
“Under Putin, government control has been facilitated by the seizure of previously private media,” said the 2008 study.
The liberal media, of course, is jubilant with several outlets saying that Democrats have finally found an antidote to the “fake news” manufactured by Fox.
“The findings might suggest that the most cost-effective way for Democrats to win elections is to start running their own infomercials or commercials on the Fox networks,” said Salon.
