Sharp as a Fox: Are foxnews.com Visitors Less Politically Knowledgeable?

Abstract

In 2012, a survey research was publicized suggesting that Fox News viewers were not only less informed than consumers of other news media but also less informed than people abstaining from news media entirely. Many have taken this to be unequivocally true and the study remains popular among political discussants to this day. However, virtually all of the investigations used to advance the argument focus on current events type knowledge and neglect important controls that could influence both political knowledge and Fox News consumption. Furthermore, no research to date has investigated any effects stemming from consuming the network’s online content (i.e., from foxnews.com ). This article aims to contribute these gaps. Using the 2016 American National Election Survey (ANES), I investigate whether consuming content from foxnews.com is associated with decreased political knowledge. I find no differences in knowledge concerning how the U.S. political system works (what I call process-related knowledge) but do find a significant, negative relationship between visiting foxnews.com and facts about society writ large (what I call society-oriented knowledge). These effects persist even when controlling for party, ideology, and conservative-group affinity and in the preponderance of matching procedures employed to reduce concerns of self-selection. Implications and avenues of future research are also discussed.