Don’t Blame Fox News for the Attack on the Capitol

Drawing from the transcripts of the relevant videos, our research shows that Fox was almost five times more likely to refer to Biden as “president-elect” than Newsmax from 3 November to 5 January. In addition, drawing from the user comments during this entire time period, “stop the steal” was the 63rd most frequent three-word construct on Newsmax but only the 134th most frequent on Fox. In fact, Fox’s results on these measures were very similar to those of MSNBC and CNN.

This mode of reporting by Fox – along with Trump’s exhortations to his base to leave Fox for networks like Newsmax – seems to have had a swift and profound impact on the viewership of the fringe news networks.

Newsmax’s YouTube subscriber count increased over 300 percent in the two weeks following the election and stood at over 1.7 million subscribers by Jan. 5, compared with just over 200,000 at the end of August.

Conspiracies Snowball in Echo Chambers
We can also compare how viewers responded to Newsmax’s content relative to Fox News’ content in terms of the ever-present social media currency of viewer “likes” and “dislikes.”

Those watching any of the YouTube newscasts can vote dislike or like. If the ratio of dislikes to the total number of impressions for a given video is, say, 0.4 – meaning 40 dislikes and 60 likes for every 100 impressions – we can conclude that it’s reaching a range of viewers, some of whom enjoy and agree with what they’re watching, and others who disagree with what they’re seeing.

For the period from the election to 5 January, this ratio was about 0.2 for both Fox News and CNN. In contrast, for Newsmax this ratio was between 0.01 and 0.02. In other words, for every 100 opinions on Newsmax videos, on average, only one or two dislikes surfaced, whereas for Fox, the number of dislikes, on average, exceeded 20.

There is no other way to interpret this: Newsmax viewers had fallen into an almost perfectly sealed echo chamber, in which commenters were reinforcing one another’s views with little to no pushback. One America News Network and Blaze TV showed very similar patterns in response to their content.

The hyperpartisan coverage on election integrity provided by Newsmax and others – combined with this echo chamber effect – makes them the more likely culprit for having riled up loyal Trump supporters.

Surely, these networks weren’t solely responsible for influencing those who stormed the Capitol. And we don’t deny that years of conspiracy theories promulgated by Fox undoubtedly helped lay the groundwork for Trump’s base of support.

But in the days and weeks following the election, these fringe networks gave viewers a space to vent and disseminate misinformation that went largely unchallenged by others in their comments sections, as well as by the hosts of the news and opinion segments.

Fox found itself in uncharted waters: maligned by the far right for being relatively restrained and responsible.

Ashique KhudaBukhsh is Project Scientist at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. Mark Kamlet is University Professor of Economics and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University. Tom Mitchell is Founders University Professor of Machine Learning, Carnegie Mellon University. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation.