Fox Viewers Paid to Watch CNN For $15/hr

[Music] is it possible to make Fox News viewers change their minds about key issues just by having them change the channel that's what a new study suggests it's titled the manifold effects of partisan media on viewers beliefs and attitudes the researchers paid some Fox News fans to watch CNN for 30 days and then they asked them some questions the results are fascinating so let's bring in David Brockman and Joshua call they conducted the study in September of 20120 and it's just been published this week welcome to you both let's not uh let's not waste any time David what did you find yeah thanks so much for having us so what we did is we recruited a fairly large group of people who predominantly watched Fox News um up until September 2020 and in September 2020 we paid them to watch CNN Instead at the time at which they usually watch Fox News and then afterwards we asked them a variety of questions about what they knew about the world and of their attitudes about current events and people like Donald Trump uh that was during the Trump presidency of course and uh I can't think the real key finding here from our perspective is essentially that we find that partisan media is sort of hiding information from voters and I think there's kind of an analogy to Putin's Russia where right now Russians we know are not getting all the information about what's actually happening in Ukraine and in the same way that we found during the Trump presidency uh those watching Fox News weren't getting all the information about what was really happening for example with covid and otherwise in the Trump Administration that then they started seeing on CNN they said oh wow I had no idea I didn't know all this because Fox News wasn't telling me so Josh you all call this partisan coverage filtering um and basically you're proving what we've sensed for a while which is Fox viewers are in the dark about bad news for the GOP that's right Fox and CNN cover different issues and Fox News predominantly covers issues that that make the GOP look good and and make Democrats look bad and and on the flip side CNN engages in this partis and coverage filtering as as well that we find for example this time the Abraham Accords were signed and these were the agreements where Israel the UAE and Bahrain signed a a major peace agreement and we see that Fox News covered this really major accomplishment about 15 times more than than CNN did so we establish both networks are are really engaging in this person and coverage filtering it's it's not about one side it's about the media at large I think you're engaging in some both sides ISM there Josh not trying to lay out a moral equivalency it's it's not about what an objective standard is it's really about how all networks do engage in this and in order for viewers to get a a realistic picture of the world we we need viewers to see all types of information and unfortunately what we find in this study is that the viewers don't want to engage in in watching all sides so as David mentioned we see that viewers we pay them for four weeks to to watch CNN but then after those payments stop they they go back to watching Fox News so even though we try to incentivize viewers to watch both Fox and and CNN they don't want to to engage in that that hard work they they want to really just watch the side that makes them feel good uh and this is why the media has such an important responsibility to to cover both sides to to hold both parties accountable