Fox News Research Articles

Images of the Israel-Gaza War on Instagram: A Content Analysis of Western Broadcast News Posts

This quantitative content analysis examined how popular Western broadcast news channels—BBC News, CNN, Fox News, Sky News, and MSNBC—used Instagram (IG) to cover the initial phase of the fifth Israel–Gaza war of the 21st century, which began on October 7, 2023. The research was undergirded by framing theory and the victim/defensive mode of reporting model. Overall, findings suggest that Western broadcast IG reporting was decidedly pro-Israel. Studied outlets consistently favored Israeli and pro-Israeli sources over Palestinian and pro-Palestinian sources; highlighted Israeli victims while neglecting Palestinian victims; and framed Israeli violence as self-defense while framing Palestinian violence as aggression.

The “Weird” Effect: Shaping U.S. Election Rhetoric

In 2024, as the U.S. election draws close, the media partition bias is increasingly obtrusive in its media framing. This essay explores the broader implications of this rhetorical shift by first analyzing the introduction of “weird” in the 2024 U.S. election discourse with Tim Walz’s viral comment and then comparing the term’s usage by MSNBC and Fox News to explore the partisan usage of the term and how they influence public perception, weaponize humor, and construct biased narratives. The comparisons will center around how semantic framing of words like “weird” creates effective negative priming for the audience and strengthens emotional tendencies such as cue-taking or confirmation bias. Finally, the essay discusses the broader implications of this rhetorical shift, embedding political battles into everyday life and complicating American political discourse. While not new in strategy, the essay underscores how this linguistic tactic uniquely infiltrates common language, reshaping political engagement in contemporary America and further polarizing American society.

Healthcare provider recommendations for COVID-19 vaccination: Prevalence, disparities, and correlates

ObjectiveWe assessed healthcare provider recommendations for COVID-19 vaccination, disparities across sociodemographic factors, and associations with health care coverage, social norms, COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, and Fox News preference. MethodsWe utilized random sample survey data of Arkansas residents (N = 2201) collected in October 2022 to identify adults with a personal provider who make up the analytical sample of this study (n = 1804). ResultsOver a third (37.2 %; n = 607) of the weighted sample did not receive a recommendation. Adjusted odds of receiving a recommendation were positively associated with health care coverage (aOR=1.66; 95 % CI [1.05, 2.64]) and negatively associated with perceiving "very few” (aOR=0.48; 95 % CI [0.33, 0.72]) or “some but not many” (aOR=0.57; 95 % CI [0.41, 0.80]) rather than “nearly all” people close to them to be vaccinated. Adjusted odds of receiving a recommendation were negatively associated with being very hesitant (vs. not at all hesitant) (aOR=0.65; 95 % CI [0.47, 0.88]). ConclusionProvider recommendations for COVID-19 vaccination were not provided for a large portion of Arkansas adults, were inconsistently provided across sociodemographic groups, and were associated with health care coverage, social norms, and vaccine hesitancy. Practice implicationsIntervening on disparities in COVID-19 vaccination may require addressing disparities in provider recommendations.

How political consultants can leverage partisan media combativeness in the U.S.

ABSTRACT The growth of partisan media presents new challenges for political consultants. Informed by social identity theory and truth-default theory, this paper examines how U.S. voters react to politicians in combative news interviews. Experiment 1 (N = 320) establishes that an ingroup politician gains more trust among ingroup voters when interviewed by cross-partisan media accusing the politician of deception than when interviewed more congenially by co-partisan media. Experiment 2 (N = 131) finds that perceived media hostility increases Democrats’ and Republicans’ trust in a politician regardless of whether the interviewer accuses the politician of deception or is congenial. Experiment 3 (N = 126) replicates the findings when a Democrat is accused of deception on Fox News. The study tested a moderated mediation model, finding that Republican and Democratic voters do not react differently in the process. The discussion highlights the practical and theoretical implications of hostile media perceptions and ingroup–outgroup partisan bias in a polarized media environment with conflicting exposure to live fact-checking and deception detection.

MEDIA REPRESENTATION OF THE IRAQI KURDISTAN REGION DURING THE REFERENDUM: A LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS

This study conducted a linguistic analysis of the media representation of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region during the Kurdistan Referendum on September 25, 2017. The research aimed to bridge two methodologies: corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. By examining how the media portrayed the Iraqi Kurdistan Region during the referendum, this study shed light on the linguistic dimensions of media coverage and the issues surrounding the referendum. Data were collected from six different news sites worldwide and analysed using corpus tools through AntConc. The findings showed that Western media outlets in the United Kingdom and the United States, including BBC News, CNN, Fox News, and Sky News, represented the Iraqi Kurdistan Region Referendum negatively. In contrast, Rudaw, a local media channel in Iraqs Kurdistan Region, provided a completely positive portrayal, while Al Jazeera maintained an unbiased attitude.

Does Tribe Trump Facts? Novel Measures of Hostile Media

A national panel survey (n = 1,332) oversampled partisans (40% Democrat, 40% Republican, 20% Independent) and exposed them to an experiment showing partisan news sources (Fox News Channel and MSNBC) and partisan content, in a test of hostile media perception. Partisans did not find the news outlets to be hostile but did find out-group content to be hostile. The study also compared partisan cable news with broadcast TV news and found that viewers of traditional broadcast news (both network and local) were more moderate and viewed the news, and news sources, as less hostile. This study is also one of the first to examine the role of emerging social media outlets which have reportedly been embraced on the right, including Parler, Telegram, MeWe, Gab, Gettr, and Rumble.

Insurrection or Protest? A corpus-linguistic analysis of the news reporting by CNN and Fox News based on the January 6, 2021, events at the US Capitol

Abstract The question if the January 6, 2021, events at the US Capitol were an insurrection, a protest or something in between, is highly contentious, and the words someone uses to refer to those events may reveal a great deal about their political stances. The present paper performs a corpus-linguistic analysis in order to investigate how the two major US news outlets CNN and Fox News reported on the January 6 events. The corpus contains 633 articles from CNN and 847 from Fox News, all of which were written over a time span of 10 months, starting on January 6, 2021. The corpus analysis is preceded by a detailed analysis of each outlet’s position on the political spectrum and their respective audiences, both based on statistics from independent polling organizations.

The Politics of Pandemic Emotions: How Trust in the Trump Administration and Distrust of the Media Affected the Psychological Toll of COVID-19

Initial studies of the COVID-19 pandemic’s emotional toll indicated different outcomes based on partisanship and media consumption. This study builds on prior research by utilizing a broad set of measures to test how (1) political party affiliation, (2) trust in President Trump, (3) news media sources, and (4) distrust in the media’s portrayal of the pandemic impacted self-ascribed increases in negative emotions during the later stages of the pandemic. Using original data from a national survey conducted in the early months of 2021, we confirm that news media and partisanship played a key role in Americans’ perceived increases in psychological distress. Specifically, we find that Democrats were more likely than Republicans to report increased worry and loneliness due to the pandemic. Viewers of CNN were also more likely to disclose increased worry, loneliness, and sadness than Fox News viewers. But both of these findings were related to and mitigated by issues of trust and distrust. In particular, trust that the Trump administration effectively responded to the pandemic was strongly associated with emotional stability above and beyond partisan differences. In addition, distrust of “mainstream media” coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic was linked with lower odds of increased negative emotions due to the pandemic.

Who Decides? Media, MAGA, Money, and Mentions in the 2022 Republican Primaries

Political elites play an important role in determining who wins primaries, yet comparatively little is known about which voices in party networks matter when different intra-party signals are sent. We examine this question using an original dataset of Republican Senate and gubernatorial primaries in 2022, an election cycle with substantial intra-party conflict in primary elections. We demonstrate that Fox News appearances (media), Trump’s endorsements (MAGA), campaign fundraising (money), and Twitter engagement (mentions) were all positively associated with vote share. We then assess the state of primary fields prior to Trump’s endorsements, showing that endorsed candidates were outperforming their competitors prior to his involvement. Finally, we consider the state of primary fields after Trump endorsed, demonstrating that his support was associated with a thirteen percentage point increase in both fundraising share and polling which lasted through to the primary. These findings provide clarity on the relative weight of different signals in contested party nominations.

Partisan Media, Trust, and Media Literacy: Regression Analysis of Predictors of COVID-19 Knowledge.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a devastating public health event that spurred an influx of misinformation. The increase in questionable health content was aided by the speed and scale of digital and social media and certain news agencies' and politicians' active dissemination of misinformation about the virus. The popularity of certain COVID-19 myths created confusion about effective health protocols and impacted trust in the health care and government sectors deployed to manage the pandemic. This study explored how people's information habits, their level of institutional trust, the news media outlets they consume and the technologies in which they access it, and their media literacy skills influenced their COVID-19 knowledge. We administered a web-based survey using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to assess US adults' (n=1498) COVID-19 knowledge, media and news habits, media literacy skills, and trust in government and health-related institutions. The data were analyzed using a hierarchical linear regression to examine the association between trust, media literacy, news use, and COVID-19 knowledge. The regression model of demographic variables, political affiliation, trust in institutions, media literacy, and the preference for watching Fox or CNN was statistically significant (R2=0.464; F24,1434=51.653; P<.001; adjusted R2=0.455) in predicting COVID-19 knowledge scores. People who identified as politically conservative, watched Fox News, and reported lower levels of institutional trust and media literacy, scored lower on COVID-19 knowledge questions than those who identified as politically liberal, did not watch Fox News and reported higher levels of institutional trust and media literacy. This study suggests that the media outlets people turn to, their trust in institutions, and their perceived degree of agency to discern credible information can impact people's knowledge of COVID-19, which has potential implications for managing communication in other public health events.

How scientific and partisan media shape support for research on stratospheric aerosol injection

ABSTRACT Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) is a controversial technique that has been suggested as a means of temporarily halting global warming. A study conducted on 441 individuals in the US in November 2023 investigated the impact of three video presentations either promoting or opposing research on SAI. Two of the videos were presented by scientific experts either promoting or opposing further research into this technology. The third was politicized, featuring Tucker Carlson on Fox News, and arguing that SAI would endanger Americans. We found that all three of the video presentations had a strong influence on general support for or against research, and that the politicized presentation not only reduced support for research but also reduced trust in science and technology to provide solutions to problems facing humanity. The findings suggest the strong impact of messaging on public opinion about research into SAI as a climate change intervention strategy.

What and Where Do I Learn About the Baby Formula Shortage Crisis? Exploring Crisis Communication Patterns, Influencers, and Information Resources

ABSTRACT The baby formula shortage escalated into a national public health crisis, spurring a public discussion on social media. As media dependency theory suggests, people likely turn to information resources they prefer. This study examined 22,055 X posts related to the baby formula shortage. By calculating 17,484 X accounts’ betweenness centrality, this article identified 20 X influencers who controlled the information flow of the baby formula shortage crisis. Crisis communication patterns were unpacked by analyzing the content of popular links shared in the network and generated by the top influencers. Most influencers are mass media, media professionals, and politicians. The frequently shared content was primarily published in mass media outlets like Fox News and Vox. Active influencers focused on the crisis information of reshelving baby formula products, responses to the shortage, and political critiques. This study extends the current literature by tracking the crisis information resources and comparing and analyzing crisis information shared in the whole network and shared by crisis influencers. It offers theoretical and practical implications for managing crises and correcting misinformation.

Judgment in the News: The Bolsonaro Government

An analysis is presented of news articles from HuffPost and Fox News of instances of judgment towards different Brazilian social actors during the presidency of Jair Messias Bolsonaro (from 2018 to 2021). The news sources were chosen to contemplate different sides of the political spectrum: HuffPost representing left-leaning views and Fox News representing right-leaning ones. Instances of judgment were classified as positive and negative. The results are interpreted in comparison to each news outlet’s alleged political slant, and a pedagogical use of this framework for the EAL classroom is proposed.

Unmasking Media Narratives through Comparative Corpus Linguistic Analysis: A Study of Russia-Ukraine Conflict

In a world inundated with diverse media narratives, the Russia-Ukraine conflict emerges as a focal point of contention, revealing a complex interplay of linguistic strategies and discursive tactics. This study aims to unravel the intricacies of lexical choices, and discursive techniques employed by Sputnik, BBC, and Fox News in their coverage of the Russia-Ukraine conflict through corpus-assisted discourse studies techniques. Three corpora were created comprising 5,347 articles with 5,829,747 tokens, sampled from February 2022 to February 2023. Moreover, Sputnik’s diction strategically employs the phrase “military operation” while eschewing “war”, portraying the conflict as a defensive, legitimate endeavour, thus reinforcing a Russian geopolitical narrative that recasts Ukraine not as a victim but as an active participant with extremist factions. BBC, in contrast, adopts a pro-Western stance, framing Ukraine as a victim and Russia as an aggressor. Fox News calls Russia’s action as an invasion, and highlights the individual roles of political leaders in shaping the conflict. However, to address the limitations of this study, future studies can expand the scope, sources, languages, and genres for analysis. Furthermore, media consumers need to practice media literacy, cross-checking, and critical analysis in the era of overloaded information in order to form well-rounded opinions on complex geopolitical events.

Renewable energy stock prices forecast using environmental television newscasts investors’ sentiment

The world is turning towards renewable energies to sustainably meet its increasing demand for energy. Naturally, this is being accompanied by a strong momentum in trading within the renewable energy market. Today, behavioral finance acknowledges the major role of wider psychological and social factors in shaping the stock market, through influencing investors' sentiment. Therefore, this paper explores the understudied question of whether environmental television newscasts can be used as a proxy for measuring investors' sentiment and in helping to improve the forecast accuracy of renewable energy stock prices. First, we compute the sentiment scores of the environmental newscasts of CNN, BBC News, MSNBC, and Fox News. We then use machine learning to implement a baseline forecast model, as well as an augmented one which takes the newscasts’ sentiment scores as input. Using four different accuracy metrics, we find that environmental TV newscasts can improve the forecast accuracy of renewable energy stock prices in 78 % of the experiments, and decrease the Mean Absolute Error, Mean Squared Error, and Root Mean Squared Error in 83.3 % of the experiments. We also find that the sentiments of conservative news outlets, such as Fox News, can improve the forecast accuracy of renewable energy stock prices more than liberal ones. Finally, we provide some insights into potential psychological dynamics that can help us make sense of the results, such as the negativity bias theory.

Analisis Resepsi Isu Pelecehan Seksual Terhadap Pekerja Perempuan Pada Film Bombshell

A real-life case at a well-known media company, Fox News in 2016, which was later made into a movie titled "Bombshell." This incident sparked the researcher's interest in exploring the audience's reception of the issue of sexual harassment of female workers presented in the movie. This incident sparked the researcher's interest in exploring the audience's reception of the issue of sexual harassment of female workers presented in the movie. Therefore, this study involved several female informants who work in various fields with diverse educational backgrounds and occupations. By using Stuart Hall's reception theory analysis, this research aims to understand and position the audience towards the messages contained in the movie "Bombshell" (2019). The research method applied is descriptive qualitative with a constructivist paradigm. Data collection was done through in-depth interviews to get in-depth perceptions from each informant. The results showed that the four informants were in The Dominant Hegemonic-Code Position. Although there are differences in answers to some questions per scene, this variability is influenced by the diverse work and life backgrounds of each informant, including education and employment. Thus, this difference provides a broader context in evaluating the audience's reception of the issue of sexual harassment raised in the movie "Bombshell" (2019).

Riots or revolution? A framing analysis of the Mahsa Amini protests in U.S. and Iranian media

This study examines the framing of the Mahsa Amini protests in American and Iranian news media using a mixed-methodology approach to analyze 200 online news stories published by two news outlets from each country between 16 September 2022 and 16 December 2022. The findings show that CNN and Fox News, despite being often seen as partisan news outlets with polarized ideological views, covered the events similarly: they framed the protests positively but engaged in orientalist discourse regarding the hijab. In contrast, Iranian media; Press TV and The Tehran Times, portrayed the protests negatively as part of a foreign agenda and neglected the hijab issue. Both countries’ media coverage aligned with their home country’s governmental interests, politicizing Iranian women to serve their narratives and echoing critiques raised by postcolonial scholars on the perpetuation of the symbolic division between East and West through the use of reductivist frames. This paper provides a framework to investigate the discourses and narratives associated with the coverage of protests and feminist movements in the Middle East. The patterns outlined in this paper can help journalists assess their objectivity and reporting style of social movements and women’s issues in the Middle East for more nuanced reporting.

PoLYTC: a novel BERT-based classifier to detect political leaning of YouTube videos based on their titles

Over two-thirds of the U.S. population uses YouTube, and a quarter of U.S. adults regularly receive their news from it. Despite the massive political content available on the platform, to date, no classifier has been proposed to classify the political leaning of YouTube videos. The only exception is a classifier that requires extensive information about each video (rather than just the title) and classifies the videos into just three classes (rather than the widely-used categorization into six classes). To fill this gap, “PoLYTC” (Political Leaning YouTube Classifier) is proposed to classify YouTube videos based on their titles into six political classes. PoLYTC utilizes a large language model, namely BERT, and is fine-tuned on a public dataset of 11.5 million YouTube videos. Experiments reveal that the proposed solution achieves high accuracy (75%) and high F1-score (77%), thereby outperforming the state of the art. To further validate the solution’s classification performance, several videos were collected from numerous prominent news agencies’ YouTube channels, such as Fox News and The New York Times, which have widely known political leanings. These videos were classified based on their titles, and the results have shown that, in the vast majority of cases, the predicted political leaning matches that of the news agency. PoLYTC can help YouTube users make informed decisions about which videos to watch and can help researchers analyze the political content on YouTube.

Conspiracy Framing and Intratextual Elements: Chryons and Clips in the FOX News Coverage of the Brett Kavanaugh Hearings

Background Coverage of the Brett Kavanaugh hearing was continual, the commentary constant, and the conspiracy theories advanced, by both Kavanaugh and Fox News, were consequential. Methods Using conspiracy as a lens, this article examines the Fox News coverage of the Senate Judiciary Confirmation Hearing of Brett Kavanaugh on September 27, 2018. On that day, Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony detailing an alleged sexual assault was heard, as was Kavanaugh’s statement in defense of himself. Specifically, the article looks at the entire day of coverage including the commentary during breaks in the hearing as well as the Fox News programming run after the completion of the day’s testimony. Results Adopting a conspiracy frame demonstrates how Fox News coverage revolved around a conspiracy by Democrats. Democrats were constructed as an unappeasable, evil force; Blasey Ford was presented as a pawn used by Democrats; and Kavanaugh was positioned as a symbolic representative of white patriarchy -- the persecuted hero fighting for the American people and way of life. Conclusions Unpacking the consequences of this narrative framing reveals the way news elements and intratextual elements of coverage (clips and chyrons) construct an interpretive frame for viewers. In the Kavanaugh case, the conspiratorial interpretive frame allowed for the dismissal of Blasey Ford, justified Kavanaugh’s aggressively defensive tone, and associated his defense with the necessary defense of American justice.

The Politicization of Climate Science: Media Consumption, Perceptions of Science and Scientists, and Support for Policy

Differential media treatment of climate change, including conservative media’s tendency to reject the anthropogenic climate change scientific consensus, has reinforced polarized perceptions of climate change. Studies have found differences in coverage patterns and in perceptions among those relying more heavily on conservative rather than liberal or moderate media. This scholarship has been limited by narrow measurements of media exposure, climate-related outcomes, and the mechanism of effects. We analyzed nationally representative US data (N = 1,181) using measures that included not only reported use of mainstream print, cable, and social media captured in past research, but also science programming, as well as far-right, alternative-health, and Christian media. On average, participants relied more heavily on centrist and liberal media, followed by Fox News and social media. The results corroborate findings associating exposure to centrist media with pro-climate attitudes, and conservative media, including Fox News with the opposite views. Use of far-right outlets was associated with the lowest levels of belief in anthropogenic climate change, perceptions of personal threat, and support for climate-friendly policy. Reliance on science media was associated with pro-climate views. Most associations were mediated via perceptions of science and scientists (using the Factors Associated with Self-Presentation of Science, FASS scale).