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Individuals seeking news content face a variety of options in the current media landscape, yet scholarly research provides little evidence regarding the conditions under which they might become more or less open to different partisan news outlets. Drawing on the case of Donald Trump's critiques of Fox News, I argue that elite rhetoric plays an important role in this process for members of both parties. I first conduct an original content analysis of Trump's tweets from 2017 to 2020 and find that he increasingly attacked Fox News on this platform. Notably, Trump's increasingly critical rhetoric about Fox correlates significantly with decreases in both Fox's daytime and prime-time ratings. Two survey experiments shed light on how individuals respond to this intraparty conflict, and I find that Trump's rhetoric affects both Republicans and Democrats. Republicans view Fox as less conservative and more critical of Trump when exposed to his critiques of the outlet. However, Republicans do not change their viewing habits until Trump promotes an alternative to Fox like OANN. Democrats respond to Trump's rhetoric by updating their perceptions of Fox's coverage and ideology as well as increasing their willingness to watch the channel, both in isolation and relative to an alternative like OANN. The results suggest that elite rhetoric is instrumental in shaping views of and demand for partisan outlets among members of both parties and can elevate more ideologically extreme sources among followers. Thus, elite rhetoric serves as a meaningful cue for individuals navigating an increasingly fragmented partisan media landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though vaccination is the most effective measure against COVID-19 infections, vaccine rollout efforts have been hampered by growing anti-vaccine attitudes. Based on current knowledge, we identified three domains (beliefs, discrimination, and news) as our correlates of primary interest to examine the association with anti-vaccine attitudes. This is one of the first studies to examine key correlates of anti-vaccine attitudes during the critical early stages of vaccine implementation in the United States. An online survey was administered in May 2021 to a non-representative, nationally based sample of adults (N = 789). Using multivariable logistic regression analysis, we found that individuals who expressed worry about COVID-19 (OR = 0.34, 95% CI 0.21, 0.55) and had greater knowledge of COVID-19 (OR = 0.50, 95% CI 0.25, 0.99) were less likely to hold anti-vaccine attitudes. Conversely, individuals who held stigmatizing views of COVID-19 (OR = 2.47, 95% CI 1.53, 3.99), had experienced racial discrimination (OR = 2.14, 95% CI 1.25, 3.67) and discrimination related to COVID-19 (OR = 2.84, 95% CI 1.54, 5.24), and who had been watching Fox News (OR = 3.95, 95% CI 2.61, 5.97) were more likely to hold anti-vaccine attitudes. These findings suggest COVID-19 beliefs, experiences of discrimination, and news sources should be considered when designing targeted approaches to address the anti-vaccine movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fair use doctrine balances the public's right to make infringing uses of copyrighted works against the owner's wish to exclude such uses. The effect an infringing use has upon the potential market for the copyrighted work -- otherwise referred to as the market harm factor -- is one of the most important factors in making that determination. Yet just how can this hypothetical, potential harm be determined? This is the question that courts and commentators alike have struggled with for as long as fair use has been a defense -- and a question that has become even more important as recent fair use doctrine begins to move towards market harm as the single most important factor in the fair use analysis. Conventional wisdom says that only the infringer may harm the market -- that is, reduce, supplant, or even destroy the consuming public's demand -- for a plaintiff's copyrighted works. This Article argues, instead, that a copyright holder's own actions provide the best evidence of plausible market harm. In examples of what I term a copyright owner's "negative" uses of her own work -- using copyright to police non-copyright interests, engaging in holdup strategies, failing to update Copyright Office records, failing to mitigate damages, or using a copyright for litigation value rather than copyright value -- there can be no market harm because the copyright holder has either made an efficient market transaction impossible or else actively chosen to forgo a copyright market for her work (opting instead for copyright-as-litigation-damages). By turning the lens away from the infringer's conduct and towards the actions of the copyright holder, this Article hopes to open up a broader question about whether we can set fair use doctrine -- and copyright policy more broadly -- in a way that encourages better, more productive uses of copyrighted works not just by would-be infringers, but rather, by the copyright holder, herself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political content on cable TV is symptomatic of the highly polarized era we live in. In this study of Fox and MSNBC, we sampled primetime evening programs on both and analyzed each major story presented. Our approach conceptualized each segment as a narrative and, as such, we coded the political arc of these stories and focused on the villains animating each set piece. On Fox the villains, who are harshly denounced, are disproportionately people of color. In contrast, on MSNBC, the villains are rarely minorities. Likewise, women are disproportionately the villains on Fox, frequently described as unintelligent and out of control. On MSNBC, women are almost never the villain. Despite the abrasiveness of its content, Fox's business model works as there is a substantial audience for this type of outrage programming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the manner in which Fox News, a U.S. conservative cable television news channel, covers the Covid-19 pandemic. Topics discussed include how Fox News' hosts downplay the threat posed by Covid-19 to public health, an array of coronavirus themes presented by the news channel including putting the blame on the spread of the coronavirus by China, and the hosts' use of alarming and forceful words in their coverage of issues.

Partisan media—typically characterized by incivility—has become a defining element of the American political communication environment. While scholars have explored the consequences of partisan media for political attitudes and behaviors, little work has looked at how variations in incivility moderate partisan media's effects. Using a population-based survey experiment, we show that incivility affectively depolarizes partisans when it comes from an in-party source (e.g., MSNBC for Democrats, Fox News for Republicans). Incivility on out-party sources affectively polarizes the audience, however, and we show that the respondent's degree of conflict aversion conditions these effects. Our results raise intriguing normative questions about the trade-offs between polarization and incivility and highlight how scholars must account for both levels of incivility and partisan slant when studying the effects of partisan media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linguistic features of a person's speech can change over time. It has been proposed that characteristics in the speech of President Donald J. Trump (DJT) have changed across time, though this claim has been based on subjective and anecdotal reports. A previous study of speech by Presidents of the United States identified an increase in the use of conversational fillers and non-specific nouns, and lower unique word counts, in the speech of President Ronald W. Reagan, but not in the speech of President George H.W. Bush. To empirically test claims of a systematic change in speech by DJT, we applied the same analysis by transcribing and analyzing publicly available Fox News interviews with DJT between 2011 and 2017. A regression analysis revealed a significant increase in the use of filler words by DJT over time. There was no significant change in numbers of unique words. The observed rise in filler words was significantly greater than filler-word change in President George H.W. Bush, and was not significantly different from the rise previously found in the speech of President Ronald W. Reagan. Identifying the reason for this linguistic change is not possible from speech samples alone, and the variables index linguistic change rather than being validated measures of change in cognitive ability. Nonetheless, features of the data such as the trajectory starting years before announcement of candidacy rule-out several potential explanations. To summarize, we find statistical evidence to support suggestions that speech by DJT has changed over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fox News has been disrupted by a series of sexual harassment scandals that caused the departure of some of its top executives and anchors. The upheaval at Fox News came from public disclosure and social pressure after the actual laws prohibiting harassment failed to deter or stop the rampant abuse at the network. Legal scholars have previously identified the problems with federal harassment law that could explain why widespread sexual harassment occurred at the highest levels of Fox News. Specifically, the existing literature details how women are forced to report harassment nearly immediately, despite the many career-related reasons not to, and yet they are not fully protected against retaliation when they do report the harassment. Scholars have also documented that if a victim's claims do make it to court, the standard for proving harassment is a nearly insurmountable burden to overcome. These identified weaknesses in the law would seem to explain why the law failed to act as a stronger deterrent to Fox News. Fox News, however, is headquartered in New York City, which has a more strongly worded local anti-harassment law: the New York City Human Rights Law. This law removes each of the identified problems in federal harassment law. The example of Fox News therefore demonstrates that, with entrenched harassing cultures, stronger anti-discrimination statutes that ''fix" the identified weaknesses of current law are not enough. This article explains and advocates for two alternative means of strengthening harassment law: expanded use of systemic harassment claims and limits on the use of confidential settlements and mandatory arbitration agreements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We measure the persuasive effects of slanted news and tastes for like-minded news, exploiting cable channel positions as exogenous shifters of cable news viewership. Channel positions do not correlate with demographics that predict viewership and voting, nor with local satellite viewership. We estimate that Fox News increases Republican vote shares by 0.3 points among viewers induced into watching 2.5 additional minutes per week by variation in position. We then estimate a model of voters who select into watching slanted news, and whose ideologies evolve as a result. We use the model to assess the growth over time of Fox News influence, to quantitatively assess media-driven polarization, and to simulate alternative ideological slanting of news channels. (JEL D72, L82) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines when partisan media effects occur during presidential campaigns. I argue that partisan media are most likely to influence candidate impressions early in the election cycle, when voters have less crystallized impressions of the candidates and are less motivated to defend their party’s nominee. Using multiple methods and two large-scale surveys spanning 2008, I show that Fox News affected favorability toward Barack Obama during the first five months of the election year, but those effects largely disappeared over the last five months. The results varied by political knowledge, however, as Fox News affected low-knowledge viewers throughout the entire year, but only affected high-knowledge viewers early in the election cycle. These results provide important new evidence on how partisan media affect viewers and when those effects occur during a presidential election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the agenda setting of candidates’ attributes and its relationship with polarized candidate evaluation among TV news viewers. Content analyses of candidates’ affective attributes during the 2012 presidential election indicate partisan imbalance from CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Fox’s Special Report. NBC Nightly News was relatively balanced. Watching a particular program was positively associated with attribute agenda setting by each program. Also, agenda setting by the Fox program was positively related to viewers’ polarized candidate evaluations, whereas agenda setting by the NBC program was negatively associated. Implications of the partisan TV news context for agenda-setting theory are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much research has looked at individual Fox News programs as a means to ascertain how the network operates in a variety of contexts, but nearly no attention has been paid to the role of individual program hosts. The host plays an important role in branding news programs and thus directly affects a network’s self-presentation and credibility. This host-based, meso-level study examines how the three Fox News prime time hosts employed differing approaches toward furthering the network’s themes opposing health care reform in August 2009. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study traces the evolution of U.S. news media frames of participants in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, part of the Arab Spring. Critical discourse analysis reveals that CNN.com and FoxNews.com employ frames previously applied to Muslims and the Middle East—U.S. friend/enemy and rational/irrational—to explain the anti-government protesters, president Hosni Mubarak and Mubarak’s government, and the Muslim Brotherhood to U.S. audiences. Media frames of certain groups fluctuate during the revolution and between CNN and Fox News, but, overall, these frames predominantly reflect U.S. political ideology that favors people seeking democracy over authoritarian rule and remains wary of Islam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

News media play a central role in democratic politics, yet we know little about how media affect the behavior of policy makers. To understand the conditions under which news media influence political elites, we advance a theory of strategic responsiveness, which contends that elected representatives are more likely to heed their constituents' preferences when voters are attentive. Accordingly, news media's influence on legislative behavior should be most apparent near elections and dependent on the partisan composition of the constituency. We capitalize on the incremental rollout of the conservative Fox News Channel in the late 1990s to evaluate our theoretical predictions. Fox News caused both Republicans and Democrats in Congress to increase support for the Republican Party position on divisive votes, but only in the waning months of the election cycle and among those members who represent districts with a sizable portion of Republican voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the fall of 2013, the ‘knockout game’ – random black-on-white assaults – became the dominant storyline in the US media. Despite no measurable increase in these types of attacks, a moral panic emerged that drew from and amplified numerous previous panics around race and violent crime. While in many ways the ‘knockout game’ is the latest iteration of exaggerated and projected white fears of black violence in the US, the current racial formation is one that increasingly promotes the idea that white Americans are systematically subordinated. In spite of a lack of material evidence to support this claim, media outlets have played a key role in stoking racialised moral panics and normalising what had once been fringe theories of white racial victimhood – to the extent that more than half of white working-class Americans feel they are part of an oppressed racial group. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Through data captured in a digital content analysis (DCA) lab, we examine coverage of Twitter across three 24-hour U.S. cable news channels: CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC. This investigation tracked Twitter coverage from its initial stage, followed by its rise to a massively used tool and its subsequent diffusion into society, evident through its plateauing coverage. News stories covering Twitter, as it penetrated into society, were more likely to use benefit/gain frames when discussing the technology, highlighting its positive social, communicative, political, and participatory impact. Benefit frames were also likely to associate Twitter with journalism. Patterns emerging through the indicator graphs plotted by the DCA lab showed that the most intense coverage occurred during crisis situations, as Twitter coverage reached saturation, followed by increased personal daily usage of Twitter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People tend to predict their preferred political candidate will win an election. The resulting “surprised losers” are examined as playing a role in the established gap between electoral winners and losers on such important outcomes as trust in government and satisfaction with the electoral process and democracy. Exposure to Fox News programming can increase wishful thinking among Republican candidate supporters, but among surprised losers, it does not increase negative attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite the prominence of the national news media, it is unclear whether elected officials are affected by the national news media in policy-consequential ways because of the difficulty of disentangling the influence of the media on Congress from Congress’s influence on the media. We use a unique opportunity to determine whether position-taking behavior in Congress and the likelihood of reelection is affected by the national news media. Using the fact that the Fox News Channel spread gradually across the United States after being launched in October of 1996 in ways unrelated to the ideology of congressional districts and the incumbent representatives, we show that representatives become less supportive of President Clinton in districts where Fox News begins broadcasting than similar representatives in similar districts where Fox News was not broadcast. Moreover, the effects took a few years to be realized, and the entry of Fox News in a district did not appear to affect which representatives were reelected. Consistent with theories emphasizing the anticipatory actions taken by elected officials to maximize their electoral security in the face of changing electoral conditions, our results suggest that the national media may slightly affect the prospects for policy change by altering representatives’ expectations and the positions that they take. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, I conduct a textual analysis of Fox News’s leading opinion programs during the Great Recession. I deconstruct the rhetorical strategies these programs deployed to advance the network’s free market interpretation of the economic crisis. Key to Fox’s interpretive strategy was a claim to represent ‘the Forgotten man’ of the downturn. However, in my analysis I show how this claim was established less by advocating policies that directly support working-class material interests and more by presenting Fox News pundits as the protectors and advocates of traditional moral-economic principles. Fox News pundits drew these principles from a long-standing strain of the American populist tradition called ‘producerism.’ My analysis illustrates how – in framing the wealthy and the business class as ‘job creators’ – Fox News programs reworked this tradition in order to include corporate managers in the moral community of producers, alongside members of the working class. This strategy was successful, I argue, because this earlier American political discourse still informs, often in unrecognized ways, the underlying normative assumptions that are expressed in modern debates about class, work, and wealth distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most research examining partisan media effects uses individual differences in exposure to news sources to predict attitude change. In this paper, we improve upon this approach by using variations in cable news coverage to predict subsequent changes in viewer impressions of the candidates. This approach allows us to examine the distinct effects of in-party and out-party candidate coverage. Content analyses and survey data show that partisan media effects result from coverage of the opposition candidate, and not from coverage of the like-minded candidate. Specifically, during the 2008 presidential election, increased coverage of Obama (McCain) on Fox News (MSNBC) made viewers less favorable toward Obama (McCain). Meanwhile, coverage of McCain (Obama) on Fox News (MSNBC) had minimal effects on viewer impressions. These results suggest that media effects persist even during an era dominated by selective exposure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study drew on the literature in motivated reasoning and 2009 Pew survey data to examine the roles of partisanship, education, news exposure, and their interactions in the misperception that health care reform would create "death panels." Radio news exposure encouraged the misperception only among Republicans, while newspaper exposure discouraged it, especially among non-Republicans. But rather than polarize perceptions along partisan lines as predicted, Fox News exposure contributed to misperception mainstreaming. Finally, this study identified a complex role for education in both inhibiting misperceptions (as a main effect) and promoting them (as an interaction with Fox News exposure). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents insights about a comparison between the application of intuitive expert judgments and algorithms in context to forensic authorization attribution. It informs that algorithms neutralize biasing factors that trouble pundits and expert judgment manifests experience and expertise of a professional however at times it could be misleading. It exemplifies by discussing the election of the U.S. President Barack Obama for the year 2012. It manifests that in this case the experts paid by Fox News, a Republican-oriented network, predicted Mitt Romney victory, whereas those paid by NBC News, a network organization, predicted Obama's victory. The pundits may have suggested this because they are corrupt to misstate their own views if they are paid enough.

The emergence of a national “Tea Party” movement in the United States stimulated much media commentary regarding the movement’s origins, goals, participants, and even temperament. Unlike political movements of the recent past, the Tea Party stands starkly to the right. This study examines nightly cable news coverage of this movement by using key frames associated with the “protest paradigm”—the tendency for media to marginalize movements by drawing attention away from core concerns raised by such movements. We ask whether the protest paradigm can be applied to a right-wing movement and whether such application varies by the ideological leaning of a given source. That is, do cable news channels use frames in ways consistent with their respective ideological hues? We draw on a representative sample of stories regarding the national movement from the most viewed nightly news programs on Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN, with the Associated Press as a reference point. Results show significant differences across sources in issue and marginalization frame use. Although utilization of marginalization frames is popular among ideological channels, traditional news sources are not immune from using these devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the concept and mission of the Tea Party group in the U.S. It examines the function and programs of the group and its qualifications to fit to the definition of a social movement. It also mentions how the party's big-money political action committees and free-market foundation have given it a national reach, and made Fox News and other conservative media outlets amplified activists' voice.

In the past 2 decades, cable television and the Internet have greatly increased the availability of media content. The phenomenon has reinvigorated a longstanding debate about the effects of this media landscape, as people selectively get exposed to specific content. Based on U.S. national survey data, this article advances research in this area by analyzing the interplay between individuals' ideological predispositions, their selective exposure to cable news, and the relationship between selective exposure and their attitudes toward an issue with key policy-making implications: Mexican immigration. Results indicate conservative Republicans are more likely to watch FOX News, which is associated with negative perceptions of Mexican immigrants and higher support for restrictive immigration policies. Findings also suggest that liberals who get exposed to FOX News also show less support for Mexican immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]