Some researchers at Stamford and Yale have just announced the results of what purports to be a scientific study. It turns out, shockingly enough, that if people stop watching Fox propaganda, a fair number of them actually start trending toward the rational:
Broockman and Kalla recruited a sample of regular Fox News viewers and paid a subset of them to watch CNN instead. (Compliance was enforced with some news quizzes, for which additional compensation was offered.) Then the treatment group of switchers and the control group of non-switchers took three waves of surveys about the news.
The results: Not only did CNN and Fox cover different things during the September 2020 survey period, but the audience of committed Fox viewers, which started the month with conservative predispositions, changed their minds on many issues.
I confess that while I have some doubts about the methodology of this particular study, I am not all that surprised by its conclusion. In fact, it immediately brought to mind this exchange from Hamlet, in which Hamlet, reluctant to divulge too much in front of other witnesses, tells a curious Horatio what he’s learned after talking to his father’s ghost:
HAMLET: There’s never a villain dwelling in all Denmark But he’s an arrant knave.
HORATIO: There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave To tell us this.
To drive the point home, there needs no University professors come from the halls of Ivy, to tell us that Fox brainwashes its viewers or that stopping the washes will restore at least some of the brains.
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