Episode Details

In the fall of 2020, two political scientists did something that sounds simple and turned out to be one of the most unsettling media experiments in recent American history.

They paid hardcore Fox News viewers to change the channel.

Just for a month. One hour a day. Prime time.

What they found tells you almost everything you need to know about why American politics feels broken, why facts don’t seem to work anymore, and why the people you love who watch Fox News aren’t going to stop.

The Experiment

David Broockman at UC Berkeley and Joshua Kalla at Yale wanted to answer a question that sounds obvious but had never been properly tested: what does watching Fox News actually do to your beliefs over time, and what happens when you take it away?

To find out, they recruited 763 Fox News viewers, people watching an average of 14 hours of Fox every single week. Overwhelmingly white men. Average age 54. Ninety-two percent self-identified as Republican. These were not casual conservatives. These were people for whom Fox News was part of the daily structure of life, the way some people drink coffee or read the paper.

The researchers took a random group from that pool and paid them $15 an hour to watch CNN during prime time instead of Fox News. One hour a day. For an entire month. They gave them weekly quizzes to verify they were actually watching and paying attention. The rest of the group kept watching Fox as normal and served as the control.

Then they measured what changed.

What One Month of Real News Did

The CNN group did not become liberals. Nobody flipped parties. Nobody called their congressman.

But their beliefs started moving.

After four weeks of CNN, participants in the treatment group were more likely to believe that voting by mail was secure. Less likely to believe Democrats were trying to steal the election. Less likely to believe Joe Biden wanted to defund the police. More critical of Donald Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Less likely to perceive the world as an exceptionally dangerous place.

These were not fringe beliefs being corrected. These were central planks of what Fox News had been broadcasting as fact, night after night, for months. And they started breaking down in four weeks.

Broockman and Kalla named what they found: partisan coverage filtering. Fox News was not simply biased in how it covered stories. It was strategically omitting entire categories of information. CNN gave substantially more airtime to COVID-19 developments and election integrity facts. Fox focused overwhelmingly on racial protests and Democratic threats. The viewers who switched weren’t being converted to a new ideology. They were simply hearing about things that had been hidden from them.

As Broockman put it directly: “Partisan media aren’t just putting a thumb on the scale for their side. They’re also hiding information that voters need to hold politicians accountable. That’s not just good for their side and bad for the other side. It’s bad for democracy, and for all of us.”

The Part That Changes Everything

Here is where the study stops being a politics story and becomes something much darker.

Two months after the experiment ended, the researchers followed up with participants.

Almost everyone had gone back to Fox News.

And every single change reversed.

The updated beliefs about mail voting. Gone. The reduced fear about election theft. Gone. The more critical view of Trump’s COVID response. Gone. The entire effect of four weeks of different information had dissolved, as though it never happened.

This is the finding that people don’t talk about enough, because it is genuinely disturbing. The question is not whether reality can reach Fox News viewers. The experiment proved it can. The question is whether it sticks. And it doesn’t.

Why It Doesn’t Stick

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