'Fox News Effect' out in force for Trump, Pew survey finds
SAN FRANCISCO — Over the past few years, researchers have used the term "Fox News Effect" to describe the significant bump the network was capable of granting favored Republican candidates.
That effect seems to have paid off in spades for President-elect Donald Trump, according to a study released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center.
Pew says that 40% of Trump voters got their news about the election from Rupert Murdoch's crown jewel. In a distant second place for supporters of the president-elect was CNN (8%), followed by Facebook (7%). Next was NBC (6%) and local news (5%), followed by much smaller segmentations.
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Trump supporters stayed with Fox even after the president-elect's well-publicized feud with former Fox star Megyn Kelly, who recently decamped to NBC after filing a sexual harassment suit against former Fox News chairman Roger Ailes.
This election put a spotlight on the power of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter as well as online-only outlets such as Breitbart and BuzzFeed.
But Pew's report shows that the power of television has far from waned.
On the Clinton voter side of the aisle, 18% of her supporters got their news from CNN, a network that Trump labeled "fake news" during his first post-election press conference. He declined to take a question from CNN's reporter.
Next for Clinton fans was MSNBC (9%), followed by Facebook and local TV (tied at 8%). The New York Times, which spearheaded aggressive reporting on Trump and his campaign, was a source for 5% of Clinton voters, with Fox trailing at 3%.
When Pew aggregated its poll results under the heading "All Voters," Fox still led as a source of political news with 19%, followed by CNN at 13% and Facebook at 8%.
Facebook does not produce any original content. Instead, people share articles from a variety of media outlets in their News Feed. The popularity of the service has made the algorithm-generated Feed — which tends to prioritize the kind of content the user has liked or shared before — an increasingly influential part of people's news habits.
After much debate over the role of Facebook-proliferated "fake news" stories and their impact on the election, the social media giant recently vowed to crack down on bogus information on its site and launched a new initiative to work closely with major news outlets on publishing tools and news products.
Pew researchers also asked respondents about their use of digital-native media sites. While they found that none were seen as a main source of news, a few stood out for being places where voters "regularly" got their campaign news.
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Google News attracted 19% of Clinton voters and 15% of Trump supporters. The Huffington Post was a big favorite of Clinton fans (24%) but not so much for Trump voters (9%). Yahoo News was almost a dead heat (11% for Trump voters, 12% for Clinton). Breitbart skewed heavily toward Trump (11% to 1%, the same split for Drudge Report), while BuzzFeed was a favorite of Clinton voters (10% to 4%).
At his recent press conference, president-elect Trump called BuzzFeed a "failing pile of garbage" after it published a dossier that claimed Trump was being blackmailed by Russian officials and that he had engaged in a sex act with a prostitute.
Fox News' ability to boost Trump's chances despite projections from more liberal media outlets such as The New York Times consistently anticipating a Clinton victory was studied last year by two Stanford University researchers.
In a paper titled "Bias in Cable News: Persuasion and Polarization," Gregory J. Martin and Ali Yurukoglu concluded that support from Fox News was capable of erasing as much as a 12-point lead by a Democratic candidate.
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