What Happens When You Force Conservatives to Watch Real News

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 ExperimentDavid 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 DidThe 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 EverythingHere 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 StickTo understand this you need to understand what Broockman and Kalla mean by partisan coverage filtering, and why it is more insidious than ordinary bias.Most people assume that partisan media works by putting a spin on the news. Take a real event and frame it favorably to your side. That’s what most people picture when they imagine biased coverage. And that exists. But it’s not the primary mechanism.The primary mechanism is absence.Fox News doesn’t just frame things differently. It decides what exists. In the weeks of this experiment, CNN covered COVID developments extensively. Fox barely touched them. The result was not that Fox viewers had a different opinion about COVID. It’s that they had almost no information about it at all. They were not misinformed. They were uninformed. And they didn’t know the difference.This distinction matters enormously, because it explains why the reversal happened so quickly.When the treatment group went back to Fox, they weren’t being persuaded away from the CNN version of events. They were simply being starved of it again. The information environment that had started to update their beliefs was cut off. And without ongoing exposure to that information, the old picture came back. Fox News doesn’t need to win arguments. It just needs to be on every night, replenishing the void.The researchers described this as the network having “tremendous ongoing power” precisely because of this replenishment effect. The more you watch, the more your beliefs are continuously restored to the channel’s preferred state. Miss a month and they start to crack. Come back and they are rebuilt within weeks.This is not how most people think about news consumption. We tend to think of what we know as an accumulation, something built up over time that stays with us. But partisan coverage filtering means that for Fox News viewers, what they know is not accumulated. It is maintained. Actively, continuously, and deliberately maintained by the network, because the moment the maintenance stops, reality begins to leak back in.This Is Not About IntelligenceOne of the most important things Broockman and Kalla found was something they did not expect to find.Before the study, the conventional wisdom in political psychology was that hardcore partisan viewers would resist information from an opposing source. The theory was that motivated reasoning would cause them to reject CNN’s coverage outright, possibly becoming even more entrenched in their original views.That didn’t happen.These viewers, 92 percent Republican, primed for years by Trump’s attacks on CNN as fake news, still absorbed new information when they watched it. Their beliefs still moved. The information still got through.That is the hopeful part of this study, and it is real. These viewers were not unreachable. They were not too far gone. Given access to different information, they responded to it.The problem is not the people. The problem is the machine they go back to every night.The Question This Study Can’t AnswerWhat the Broockman and Kalla study leaves open is the question of how you break the cycle when the cycle is voluntary.Nobody forced these viewers to return to Fox. They chose to. And the researchers’ own follow-up work on selective exposure suggests that this is not really a choice in the traditional sense. Television consumption is habit-forming in ways that operate below the level of conscious decision-making. People watch what they’ve always watched. They watch what everyone around them watches. They watch what makes them feel comfortable and recognized and part of something.Fox News has been extraordinarily successful at engineering all three of those things. The viewing habit, the social reinforcement, the feeling of belonging to a community that sees what others can’t see. By the time someone has been watching fourteen hours a week for a decade, the channel is not just a news source. It is an identity infrastructure.And identity infrastructure doesn’t yield to four weeks of CNN.What This Means for Everyone ElseIf you have spent any time trying to have a political conversation with a committed Fox News viewer, this study probably explains experiences you’ve had without being able to name them.You cite a fact. They’ve never heard of it. You reference an event that happened in front of cameras. They say it’s being misrepresented. You show them data. They say the data is from sources that can’t be trusted.This is not stubbornness in the way we usually mean that word. It is the predictable output of an information environment engineered to make outside information feel inherently suspect. Fox News spent decades teaching its audience that mainstream media lies, that academics distort, that experts have agendas. That training is precisely why the information filtering works so well. It doesn’t just hide facts. It trains viewers to reject the verification systems that would allow them to notice what’s been hidden.Broockman put it plainly: how can a voter hold a politician accountable for an act they don’t know occurred?They can’t. And that’s the point.One Month Was Enough to Start. It Wasn’t Enough to Finish.The real lesson of this study is not that Fox News viewers are hopeless. The study proved the opposite. Given four weeks of different information, they moved. They learned. They started to see things that had been kept from them.The lesson is about the power of sustained information environments over time.One month of CNN moved beliefs that years of Fox had built. But then Fox rebuilt them in two months.The machine is running every night. Four weeks off the machine is not enough to undo what years on it created. And most people are not going to voluntarily take four weeks off. They have no reason to. Fox gives them community, identity, emotional stimulation, and the daily reassurance that they are the ones who understand what’s really happening.That reassurance is the product. Everything else is just packaging.And as long as the machine keeps running, it will keep winning.Not because the people inside it can’t think. Because the machine never stops thinking for them.Watch on YouTubeSources:Broockman, D. & Kalla, J. (2022). The Manifold Effects of Partisan Media on Viewers’ Beliefs and Attitudes: A Field Experiment with Fox News Viewers. American Political Science Review (2023).Broockman, D. & Kalla, J. (2025). Selective Exposure and Echo Chambers in Partisan Television Consumption: Evidence from Linked Viewership, Administrative, and Survey Data. American Journal of Political Science.UC Berkeley News. (April 7, 2022). When Fox News viewers flip to CNN, their opinions shift too, study finds.EGAP. (April 29, 2022). Priority Theme Spotlight: David Broockman and Joshua Kalla. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe