Fox News and 2000 US election

The day after the 2000 US presidential election nobody knew who would become the next president of the United States. The world had to wait until 12th December, when the Supreme Court (9 persons NOT elected by the people) decided about Florida's 25 electoral votes.

Stefano Della Vigna (assistant professor of economics at Berkeley) and Ethan Kaplan (Stockholm University) wrote a paper called "The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting" that talks about the impact of Fox News on the 2000 election.

Probably George Walker Bush should have thanked the Supreme Court and Rupert Murdoch's Fox News.

Abstract

Does media bias affect voting? We address this question by looking at the entry of Fox News in cable markets and its impact on voting. Between October 1996 and November 2000, the conservative Fox News Channel was introduced in the cable programming of 20 percent of US towns. Fox News availability in 2000 appears to be largely idiosyncratic. Using a data set of voting data for 9,256 towns, we investigate if Republicans gained vote share in towns where Fox News entered the cable market by the year 2000. We find a significant effect of the introduction of Fox News on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996 and 2000. Republicans gain 0.4 to 0.7 percentage points in the towns which broadcast Fox News. The results are robust to town-level controls, district and county fixed effects, and alternative specifications. We also find a significant effect of Fox News on Senate vote share and on voter turnout. Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 8 percent of its viewers to vote Republican. We interpret the results in light of a simple model of voter learning about media bias and about politician quality. The Fox News effect could be a temporary learning effect for rational voters, or a permanent effect for voters subject to non-rational persuasion.

The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting (37 page pdf file)

1 Introduction page 1
2 Fox News History and Data page 3
3 Empirical results page 7
4 Interpretations page 15
5 Conclusion page 20
References and tables