Watching Fox News Addicts Viewers and Misinforms Them on Climate Change - by Joe Romm

A new study finds that both conservative and non-conservative media are addictive to viewers. But conservative media like Fox News is much more addictive.  It is the “crack” of cable news.

Of course, Fox News is also far more inaccurate on issues like climate change than non-conservative media (such as CNN and MSNBC — see figure below).  Thus its viewers are far more misinformed on a broad range of issues, as many studies have found.

This latest study specifically points out that “our results suggest that governmental inaction on climate change can partially be attributed to the echo chamber created by conservative media on the issue.”  That’s obvious, I know, but it always bears repeating because the stakes are so high.  We have a death spiral of disinformation for conservatives — “death” spiral because inaction on climate change is ultimately self-destructive for all humans, not merely those who are accurately informed on science.

Fox News appears to be more addictive by design, as the study and the Yale news release note.  A key strategy is “conservative media’s attempts to insulate their audiences from opposing views — in part, by denouncing the mainstream media (i.e., other news sources) as liberal, biased, and not to be trusted.”

These core findings “may help to explain why the overwhelming scientific evidence that global warming is happening and caused by human activities has failed to gain traction among conservatives, or at least among users of conservative media in the United States”:

“In essence, conservative media audiences are consuming messages that both challenge the reality of global warming and warn that any contrary information from scientists or the mainstream media should be dismissed,” the study notes.  “This perpetuates further use of conservative media, which reinforces their current beliefs about global warming, and so on in a continuing feedback loop.”

Watching Fox News Addicts Viewers and Misinforms Them on Climate Change