A philosophical question...

[Antonio the Sixth]

I've always wondered. Are people conservative because they watch Fox News, or do they watch Fox News because they are conservative ?

It might seem trivial, but different answers have, in fact, a very considerable impact. If the right answer is the latter, the it's just a stupid TV which tells stupid people what they want to hear. Otherwise, it's really 21st Century's propaganda and a threat to democracy. It is, of course, a mix of the two, but how much it actually influences the way people think (or rather, stop thinking) is a key issue.

[greenforest32]

Conservatism is first a flawed thought process strongly influenced by religion. Everything else (political positions, rhetoric, propaganda "news" pandering to the ideology) comes second.

[Franzl]

I've always wondered. Are people conservative because they watch Fox News, or do they watch Fox News because they are conservative ?

It might seem trivial, but different answers have, in fact, a very considerable impact. If the right answer is the latter, the it's just a stupid TV which tells stupid people what they want to hear. Otherwise, it's really 21st Century's propaganda and a threat to democracy. It is, of course, a mix of the two, but how much it actually influences the way people think (or rather, stop thinking) is a key issue.

It depends what exactly you mean. I would say that only a certain type of person would be interested in hearing what FOX has to say (i.e. people that are forced to watch FOX by parents, relatives, etc., people that have been told that only FOX doesn't belong to the liberal media). In other words, the only real reason a person could be dependent on FOX for "news" would be because he's already influenced by conservative thought. Any neutral (rational) person would quickly discover the inherent bias in their reporting.

I do think that FOX shapes opinions on specific issues. You know, causing people to think that Hussein was behind 9/11, that Obama isn't a natural born citizen, that people die on the streets in communist places like Britain because of state run healthcare. Their views on those issues likely weren't formed before watching FOX.

So I think FOX does make already dumb people dumber, and that's somewhat frightening, of course...but I don't think it's likely that more people actually become "conservative" because they watched FOX.

[Napoleon]

Might have more of an effect on the 65+ demographic that's really moved away from Democrats over the last decade or two.

[© tweed]

sort of both.  the Murdoch empire plays a significant role in molding the agenda but there's is a bit of self-selection at the end of the line that leads to the preaching-to-the-choir effect.

[anvi]

Yes, it does work both ways.  As Franzl says above, media outlets do shape opinions, particularly in the ways the apply a set of political views to events that are either currently happening or that people don't know about.  But, at the same time, people do tend to gravitate toward media sources of certain kinds to confirm views they already tend towards.  People did this with newspapers before, and now they do it with television.  What we often think of as "chicken-and-egg" problems are often not issues of which thing came first at all, but are rather occasions of interdependence and reinforcement.