What Happens When Fox News Viewers Watch CNN Instead?

04/27/22 • 49 min

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When it comes to cable news, Fox and CNN have pretty partisan viewers. So, what would happen if Fox viewers tuned into CNN for a month? Would they suddenly adopt different views more aligned with CNN? UC Berkeley political scientist David Broockman and his colleagues wanted to find out. When they paid Fox News viewers to watch CNN, they found that Fox News viewers became more supportive of vote-by-mail, and less likely to believe that then-Democratic candidate Joe Biden wanted to eliminate all police funding. The findings have made huge waves in the media, so we decided to take our unique microscope to the paper to see if we can get a fuller picture of what these findings tell us.

Previous Episode

Does Russian Propaganda Influence Ukrainians?

By now, we've heard a lot about how state-owned Russian television is distorting the truth about the war in Ukraine. But Russian TV doesn't just reach Russian viewers. Some Ukrainians can receive its analog television signals.

To understand how this propaganda influences Ukrainians, we turned to New York University political scientist Arturas Rozenas, to talk about his 2017 paper, "Electoral Effects of Biased Media: Russian Television in Ukraine".

Next Episode

Nuclear Brinkmanship In Ukraine

One of the biggest questions surrounding the conflict in Ukraine is to what extent the shadow of nuclear war affects the degree of involvement by Western countries. Much of the literature in nuclear deterrence theory assumes the incentives of mutually assured destruction are strong enough to avoid a nuclear war, and hence the existence of nuclear capabilities in Russia and the West should not play much of a role in how the conflict progresses. But one paper by a late University of California Berkeley political scientist calls this theory into question. On this episode, we discuss Robert Powell’s “Nuclear Brinkmanship, Limited War, and Military Power”. In it, Powell builds a model that explains how conflicts can lead to nuclear war even under mutually assured destruction, but also how threat of that war changes the dynamics of any conflict from the beginning. Both findings give us a number of insights into the current situation in Ukraine.