• WashingtonPost.com, Friday, May 5, 2006 11:45 AM

Is it possible that Fox News got President Bush elected in 2000? According to a new study, the answer is yes.  Factoring out other influences, Fox News alone may have influenced enough voters--including more than 10,000 in the pivotal state of Florida--to have put Bush into the White House.  "Our estimates imply that Fox News convinced 3 to 8 percent of its audience to shift its voting behavior towards the Republican Party, a sizable media persuasion effect," says Stefano DellaVigna of the University of California at Berkeley and Ethan Kaplan of StockholmUniversity, who conducted the study.  To check out the possibility that Fox News has that kind of persuasive clout, Rick Morin of The Washington Post ran his own experiment to check out what he calls the Fox News Effect.  What he discovered was "strong evidence that people apply a political litmus test to the news, avoiding sources they view as unfriendly while seeking out compatible sources."

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