For The Attack On The Capitol – Don’t Blame Fox News
In the days following the attack on the Capitol, The New York Times, in its print edition, ran an op-ed titled “Yes, You Should Blame Fox For Whipping Up Radicals.” The Washington Post ran an article with the headline “Trump Couldn’t Have Incited Sedition Without the Help of Fox News.”
But our analysis tells a different story.
We studied the official YouTube channels of six U.S. cable news networks. We looked at cable news powerhouses CNN, Fox News and MSNBC. But we also focused on three fringe networks – Newsmax, One America News Network (OANN) and Blaze TV – that have a relatively homogeneous audience, relatively extreme opinions and limited reach.
Our unique dataset – which consisted of all the comments made by viewers of those six networks from Nov. 3, the date of the presidential e...