Republicans who do not watch Fox less likely to back Trump
Switching media network affects views, poll shows
Republicans who get their news from nonconservative mainstream media outlets are less likely to support Donald Trump than those who follow conservative outlets. And sizable numbers from the first group say they think Trump acted criminally, according to a recent New York Times/Siena College poll.
This division could affect his standing among Republicans in the general electorate — a decidedly different group from GOP primary voters. That is in line with research that shows changing the media habits of Fox News consumers may actually change their views.
In our poll, 100 percent of the Republicans who said they got their news from Fox News or other conservative sources said they intended to support Trump in the general election. This stands in contrast to Republicans whose main media sources are outlets such as CNN and major news organizations: 79 percent of them plan to vote for Trump, and 13 percent said they planned to vote for President Biden.
And across many measures, mainstream media Republicans are less supportive of Trump. They are 20 percentage points less likely than conservative media Republicans to say they are enthusiastic about Trump as the party’s nominee and more than 30 percentage points less likely to say Trump’s policies have helped them personally.
Despite the perception that most Republicans watch Fox News, the share of Republicans who said they got their news from sources such as CNN and major newspapers was similar to the share who said they primarily consumed conservative media — roughly 30 percent in each case.
These Republicans differ from consumers of conservative media primarily in terms of their ideology: They were much more likely to describe themselves as politically moderate. Nikki Haley had about 30 percent support among these Republicans and 4 percent among conservative media consumers (the poll was taken before Haley dropped out of the race).
Researchers have long pondered a kind of chicken-and-egg question with conservatism and conservative media: Does watching more conservative media change your views, or are you more attracted to it because of your views? Two political scientists, David Broockman at the University of California, Berkeley, and Joshua Kalla at Yale University, conducted an experiment trying to answer that question.
“We know from our other research that many Fox News viewers are in an echo chamber and are quite conservative,” Broockman said. “There’s a lot of skepticism that strong partisans could not be persuaded, and we wanted to challenge that assumption.”
In their experiment, they randomly assigned Fox News viewers to watch CNN for a month, comparing their political views after they switched to the network with Fox viewers who did not make the switch. The result? Getting conservative news viewers to watch mainstream news caused many of the participants to shift away from hard-right views on issues such as immigration and race relations. And they found changes in how participants evaluated Trump.
“It was amazing to see that the study participants learned new facts about the world from watching CNN,” Kalla said. “These are people who don’t trust CNN; they think it’s propaganda and fiction.
“The fact that they find that these people, in particular, learn something new about the world suggests that they’re more open to persuasion and hearing the other side than we might assume.”
Participants did not just move toward moderate views on issues such as immigration; they also started to question their trust in Fox News itself. At the end of the study, respondents were less likely to agree with the statement: “If Donald Trump did something bad, Fox News would discuss it.”
‘There’s a lot of skepticism that strong partisans could not be persuaded, and we wanted to challenge that assumption.’ DAVID BROOCKMAN, political scientist at UC, Berkeley
Experiments like this have little real-world application, but they do reinforce the notion that conservative news viewers see the current political landscape through a different lens.
This extends to how Republicans are thinking about the criminal charges their party’s nominee faces. Republicans who consume nonconservative mainstream media were more likely to say that the charges against Trump were legitimate, that Trump knowingly made false claims about the election being stolen, and that he should be found guilty in the election interference trial in Washington, according to a December survey.
And in the recent survey, the gap between the two types of Republicans persists. Republicans who watch mainstream media are more than three times as likely to say Trump acted criminally as those who consume conservative media. And the share of mainstream media Republicans saying this has grown over the last two years, reaching a peak of 43 percent in December. It is now down to 34 percent.
“I do think that concealing private documents with perhaps the intent to disseminate them is to an extent treason,” said Briana Dunbar, 20, a political science student at Ohio State who says she is considering supporting Trump in the fall. “If he is found guilty, I will not vote for him.
“But I’m not the judge, and it’s not up to me,” added Dunbar, who said she gets most of her news from ABC News or her political science classes. “Once the ruling comes down, I will trust what they say. If he’s not guilty, that’s probably who I would vote for. But November is a ways away.”
While a notable share of these mainstream media Republicans say they do not plan to back Trump, many could ultimately decide to vote for him in November. In 2016, after the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump was recorded boasting about groping women, many in the party considered deserting him. Even most of those voters found a way back to their party’s nominee.
Among conservative media Republicans, the share who said Trump did not commit crimes has remained largely unchanged.
Nateasha Friesen, 56, of Fresno, Calif., is an avid consumer of news from places such as Newsmax and The Epoch Times, news outlets that she says are “not the media telling me what to think and instead allowing me to make an educated decision for myself.”
“I triangulate the information that I’m getting, with a focus on figuring out what their sources are and the transparency that they’re providing,” she said.
Friesen plans to support Trump in the fall. “My views on this have been very steady: He has not committed any crimes. I’m pretty confident the trials are politically motivated.”
About 10 percent of independents say they watch conservative news, and nearly all of them say they lean toward the Republican Party.
A much smaller group of Republicans surveyed — around 13 percent — primarily got news from social media. This group supported Trump at a rate as high as those consuming conservative media, but they were more inclined to agree with mainstream media Republicans that Trump committed crimes. Still, this group saw charges as primarily politically motivated.
But these social media Republicans were far younger than other Republicans. They were also less likely to say they planned to vote in November.
The New York Times/Siena College poll of 980 registered voters nationwide was conducted from Feb. 25 to 28, 2024. The margin of sampling error for the presidential ballot choice question is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points among registered voters.