Information and Action
August 18th, 2005Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
An alert Prometheus reader pointed us in the direction of an article in today’s New York Times on the effects of Fox News on voting. Here is an excerpt:
“The share of Americans who believe that news organizations are “politically biased in their reporting” increased to 60 percent in 2005, up from 45 percent in 1985, according to polls by the Pew Research Center. Many people also believe that biased reporting influences who wins or loses elections. A new study by Stefano DellaVigna of the University of California, Berkeley, and Ethan Kaplan of the Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University, however, casts doubt on this view. Specifically, the economists ask whether the advent of the Fox News Channel, Rupert Murdoch’s cable television network, affected voter behavior. They found that Fox had no detectable effect on which party people voted for, or whether they voted at all.”
This view is of course similar to those frequently discussed here, such as the following:
*some believe that the views on climate science advanced by climate skeptics prevents certain actions on climate change, or conversely that the consensus view leads to a different sort of action,
*some believe that views on evolution lead to certain religious beliefs,
*some prominent U.S. leaders would have use believe that the threat of WMDs compels preemptive military action (and there are of course other flavors of this precautionary perspective),
*some argued that the publication Bjorn Lomborg’s 2000 book would lead to anti-environmental policies, and so on and on.
The study reported by the New York Times ought to give pause to all of these folks, on all sides of issues, who are waging their political battles through science. There is very little evidence of a political war being waged on science, simply because science is too important to everyone’s agenda. What we are seeing are political wars being waging through and with science. This is one subject that has wide bipartisan agreement.
Here is some more from the Times article:
“Why was Fox inconsequential to voter behavior? One possibility is that people search for television shows with a political orientation that matches their own. In this scenario, Fox would have been preaching to the converted. This, however, was not the case: Fox’s viewers were about equally likely to identify themselves as Democrats as Republicans, according to a poll by the Pew in 2000. Professors DellaVigna and Kaplan offer two more promising explanations. First, watching Fox could have confirmed both Democratic and Republican viewers’ inclinations, an effect known as confirmatory bias in psychology. (Borrowing from Simon and Garfunkel, confirmatory bias is a tendency to hear what we want to hear and disregard the rest.) When Yankee and Red Sox fans watch replays of the same disputed umpire’s ruling, for example, they both come away more convinced that their team was in the right. One might expect Fox viewers to have increased their likelihood of voting, however, if Fox energized both sides’ bases. The professors’ preferred explanation is that the public manages to “filter” biased media reports. Fox’s format, for example, might alert the audience to take the views expressed with more than the usual grain of salt. Audiences may also filter biases from other networks’ shows.”
The bottom line is that the world is much more complicated than a linear path from information to action might suggest.
August 18th, 2005 at 4:27 pm
I forgot to link the study directly, here it is:
http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/sdellavi/wp/foxvote05-08-15.pdf
August 18th, 2005 at 7:39 pm
I thought this was quite interesting, considering your points on propoganda. I still have some thoughts:
1) Has there been any consideration of “delaying” action? I’d say the public is about ten years behind the science. If this is due to think tanks, it’s still effective.
2) I see here FOX did not even increase voter turnout. But your previous studies on public perceptions did show an increase in partisanship. If this is true, then it does still have a significant effect from the Republican perspective. Whereas Democrats see politics as reaching the most voters, the success of the Republican strategy is in focusing like a laser on rallying the base and increasing partisanship. When forty percent of the country identifies themselves as conservatives and twenty-thirty percent as liberal, polarizing the country is seen as an advantage since Democrats would have to peel off more of the middle. As we have seen the past decade or so, appealing to the faithful can move mountains.
Also, along these same lines, I find it hard to believe the media has *no* effect. Certainly during the Clinton presidency, the right wing was able to manufacture scandal after scandal and magnify it through the echoe chamber.
I see the same thing happening with the war. You could say, well, all the fawning media didn’t keep people from turning on the war, or you could say, why’d it take so long?
Is all this money spent on campaign commercials and think tanks and PR for not?
August 18th, 2005 at 10:30 pm
Very interesting. Malcolm Gladwell cites a similar study with opposite results in his 2000 book The Tipping Point. In Section 10 of Chapter 2, Gladwell discusses a study led by Brian Mullen of Syracuse University. It’s too long to distill properly here, but the upshot is, Mullen spliced video of Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw covering the 1984 presidential race. He showed that while Brokaw and Rather were emotionally neutral in discussing either candidate, Jennings was decidedly biased toward one candidate (the eventual winner). They then took it a step further and performed phone surveys to figure out which newscast was most watched by individual voters, and correlated that information with local voting patterns. “The subtle pro-Reagan bias in Jennings’s face seems to have influenced the voting behavior of ABC viewers.” They repeated the experiment with similar results in the 1988 race. The book in general, and that section in particular, is pretty fascinating.
Mullen et al., 1986, Newscasters’ facial expressions and voting behavoir of viewers: Can a smile elect a President?, J. of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 291-295 p.
Gladwell links that study to this:
Wells and Petty, 1980, The effects of overt head movement on persuasion, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 1(3), 219-230 p.
August 18th, 2005 at 10:44 pm
And to answer Dylan’s question: read Freakanomics by Levitt and Dubner. They also have a great blog here: http://www.freakonomics.com/blog.php
The answer is a lot more complicated than they descibe (you might read just the abstract of this paper: http://abs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/47/5/541 )
but their basic answer (if I remember correctly, I don’t have the book in front of my this minute) in looking at the data is that the vast amounts of $$ being spent on political campaigns is being spent very unwisely, as it doesn’t seem to have much influence on voting patterns.
August 19th, 2005 at 7:27 am
[i]*some believe that the views on climate science advanced by climate skeptics prevents certain actions on climate change, or conversely that the consensus view leads to a different sort of action[/i]
Roger, I noticed you often cite public opinion polls as if the public had strong influence on policy. As you correctly identify the lack of a linear path from information to policy, there is a lack of a linear path from public opinion to policy. The think-tanks DO have an effect on policy. Not by shifting public opinion, but by providing access to elite decision-makers and giving them “cover” to avoid action. There is a growing body of work on “the social construction of non-problemicity” that you should be aware of. A good place to start may be the work of Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap(see for instance; McCright and Dunlap. 2003. Defeating Kyoto: The Conservative Movement’s Impact on U.S. Climate Change Policy. Social Problems, v50, n3, pp348-373)
August 19th, 2005 at 8:56 am
Thanks Bob for your comments. My citing of public opinion polls is actually to make the point that you have made well, i.e., that public opinion is not always a good indicator of policy action. Thanks.
August 19th, 2005 at 10:07 am
These results are interesting, but a few notes of caution are worth mentioning before anyone buys the false notion that “Propaganda does not work.”
For one, this study only takes us through election 2000 (and Fox News only came into being in late 1996). I think it would be much more informative to look at the effects of Fox News on voters in the 2002 and 2004 elections. That is when the government’s wartime propaganda machine (what else would you call it?) was much more clearly in sync with the programming on Fox News (and, in many cases other news networks). I found this web page (http://www.classroomtools.com/propworks.htm) summarizing some results from a couple of very interesting PIPA polls that were conducted before the 2004 election… a few of their findings regarding American’s (mis)perceptions are well worth mentioning here:
1) 48% incorrectly believed that evidence of links between Iraq and al Qaeda have been found,
among those with one of these misperceptions, 53% support the war, rising to 78% for those who have two of the misperceptions, and to 86% for those with all 3 misperceptions.
2) 22% that weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq,
3) 25% that world public opinion favored the US going to war with Iraq,
4) overall 60% had at least one of these three misperceptions,
5) the frequency of Americans’ misperceptions varies significantly depending on their source of news,
6) those who primarily watch Fox News are significantly more likely to have misperceptions, while those who primarily listen to NPR or watch PBS are significantly less likely,
7) among those with none of the misperceptions listed above, only 23% support the war,
…
9) perceptions of what the experts are saying are also highly correlated with intentions to vote for the President in the upcoming election.
What more proof do you need? When large numbers of voting Americans are deliberately led to believe in such utter falsehoods… I think it is safe to say that the Bush Administration’s propaganda worked. Furthermore, these polls results go a long way to also proving that Fox News is NOT the only major media outlet that gives regular voice to propaganda put forth by right-wing entities.
One final point. We know that the cable news network with the highest ratings and biggest profits, under GWB, was Fox News. This has created more incentive for other networks to follow their business model of cheering on the war effort and never criticizing or questioning the — now, largely discredited — government line. The point is that think tank and government propaganda, channeled through “news network” programming, is not only speaking to the viewing audience, it is speaking to the entire media marketplace. Part of the right wing media’s success over the past 3 years was to prove that “news” programming that cheerleads for war and ignores inconvenient facts, which often belie the standard government “story-line,” is a viable business model.