Poll: Media habits sway GOP views
Those not watching Fox News less likely to support Trump
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 showing that changing the media habits of Fox News consumers may change their views.
In the poll, 100% 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 like CNN and major news organizations: 79% of them plan to vote for Trump, and 13% said they planned to vote for President Joe 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 like CNN and major newspapers was similar to the share who said they primarily consumed conservative media — roughly 30% 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% support among these Republicans and 4% among conservative-media consumers (the poll was taken before Haley dropped out of the race).
Researchers have long pondered a kind of chickenand-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 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 a number of issues like immigration and race relations. And they found changes in how participants evaluated Trump.
Participants did not just move toward moderate views on issues like 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.”
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. Those who consume nonconservative mainstream media were more likely to say the charges against Trump were legitimate, he knowingly made false claims about the election being stolen, and 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. Those who watch mainstream media are more than three times as likely as those who consume conservative media to say Trump acted criminally. And the share of mainstream-media Republicans saying this has grown over the past two years, reaching a peak of 43% in December. It is now down to 34%.
“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.”
Dunbar 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.”
The New York Times/Siena College poll of 980 registered voters nationwide was conducted Feb. 25 to 28. The margin of sampling error for the presidential ballot-choice question is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points among registered voters.