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.