Fox News viewers more likely to embrace debunked conspiracies and violence

People who regularly watch Fox News are more likely to believe in a debunked conspiracy theory that has been widely linked to violence, according to a recent study.

“Recent years have witnessed an increase in white Americans’ support for the Great Replacement Theory (GRT), the xenophobic conspiracy theory that posits that political elites are embracing permissive immigration policies to bring in ‘obedient’ voters who will vote for them and who will eventually replace native white citizens,” scholars Jesse Rhodes, Seth Goldman and others wrote for the journal PS: Political Science & Politics. They added that, because Fox News frequently promotes this theory, the article’s authors decided to study “the American Multiracial Panel Study to investigate whether exposure to Fox News is associated with support for the GRT.” After surveying more than 1,000 people over a period of more than a year, they concluded that “whites who receive their political news from Fox News are significantly more likely to support core tenets of the GRT than those who do not,” a phenomenon consistent with what they dubbed a “Fox News Effect.”

“Our study extends this research by exploring whether exposure to Fox News is associated with stronger support for key tenets of the GRT among whites,” the authors wrote. “Using results from a panel survey of American adults, we found that whereas pluralities of whites support core aspects of the GRT, majorities and sometimes supermajorities of Fox News viewers express support for these beliefs. We then tested the robustness of this bivariate relationship with multivariate OLS regression and discovered that exposure to Fox News was associated with greater support for the GRT, controlling for demographic and political characteristics.”

To explain the link between watching Fox News and supporting the Great Replacement Theory, the authors wrote that “undocumented immigration is best understood as a ‘hard’ issue and, as a result, public opinion is more likely to be susceptible to strike elite influence,” adding later in their paper that “studies of mass opinion have shown that Americans have low levels of information concerning the scope of undocumented immigration to the United States and the factors that account for the recent increase in unauthorized migration to the country. Given this lack of knowledge and the consistently positive coverage of the GRT on Fox News, it is no surprise that Fox News viewers have opinions closely aligned with the core tenets of this troubling belief system.”

In the United States, the Great Replacement Theory was cited as the rationale behind a number of mass shootings including a 2018 synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, a 2019 attack on a Poway Chabad center, a 2019 mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart and a 2022 shooting at a Buffalo supermarket.

“According to the study text, scholars point out that individuals who subscribe to these beliefs also show an increased inclination to endorse violence as a political tool,” PsyPost’s Karina Petrova wrote when describing the study. “The perpetrators of several mass shootings targeting minorities in the United States have cited the theory in their writings. Because the ideology frequently emerges alongside acts of violence, understanding how the beliefs spread has become a major concern for social scientists.”

Despite the serious consequences of the Great Replacement Theory, Trump has appointed a number of high-ranking officials who support it. When one of them, Jeremy Carl, withdrew his nomination for Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizational Affairs because of his pushing of GRT, he defended himself by saying “I mostly just kind of saying this ... to troll the libs.”

Adding he wanted to take “some genuine ironic distance,” Carl claimed that “I don’t actually think that we are in a cultural genocide per se. I’m trying to kind of push people.” Yet he later added that Democrats “hyperdiversify the country.”