LAUSR

The United States (and, indeed, the world) would benefit enormously from more focus from scholars of political communication on the specific dynamics and role of Fox News in American political life. Fox is by no means obscure—but in some respects its very ubiquity (it is on, constantly, in the office of essentially every Republican Party member of Congress, for example) can tend to obscure exactly how strange it is. Ideological media is not new in the United States, but Fox does not really cover the world with the strong principles-oriented agenda of a National Review or similar print publication. Nor is the idea of a strictly partisan press new, although it is new to the medium of television. But although Fox sometimes seems to serve as a kind of propaganda organ for Republican Party leadership, it other times serves as more of a factional player that tries to influence the party’s direction. This close, but somewhat ambiguous, relationship between Fox and Republican Party leadership has only become more salient since the 2016 primary campaign and Donald Trump’s ascension to the office of the president. The president is known to be an avid consumer of Fox News, and credible reports suggest that even members of the executive branch often seek to influence internal deliberations by appearing on Fox while some senior officials, most notably John Bolton, appear to have been appointed largely on the strength of their Fox News work. The basic contours of the situation are not unknown, but they are remarkable, and relatively little is known about the details. A handful of studies conducted by economists over the years, however, suggest that conventional wisdom may be greatly underestimating the significance of Fox as a factor in American politics. DellaVigna and Kaplan (2007) find that the effect on voting behavior of the rollout of Fox News between 1996 and 2000 was large enough to account for George W. Bush’s election victory in 2000, and Martin and Yurukoglu (2017), using a different methodology to study a later period, find an even larger impact, suggesting that absent Fox the GOP vote share would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008. These are large and growing impacts, which could be swaying enormous numbers of elections or—perhaps more plausibly—preventing the vicissitudes