Perceived Racial Threats Increase Demand for Conservative Media: Evidence from Black Lives Matter Protests and Fox News Ratings

Abstract

With the growing evidence that the content on Fox News Channel (FNC) influences its viewers' attitudes and behaviors, it is important that we better understand the real-world factors driving demand for FNC, especially among those who are not already frequent viewers. Yet, our ability to identify these factors is plagued by difficult methodological issues, most notably, the selection problem of inferring the determinants of demand from content. This study overcomes these challenges by exploiting the substantial spatial and temporal variation in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests during 2020, the year of George Floyd's murder and other prominent police killings of Black Americans, to examine whether perceived racial threats increased FNC viewership. We construct a census block group-week panel of BLM protests and FNC ratings during 2020. With this spatial panel, we test whether the local occurrence of a BLM protest increased the portion of the local population watching FNC in the subsequent period. We find that the number of FNC viewers rose by approximately 2% following a BLM protest. At the same time, we find evidence that viewership of CNN, a moderate news channel, was unaffected and possibly declined. Our results, which survive robustness checks, tests of the modeling assumptions, and replication at the census tract level, can be interpreted as causal under reasonable assumptions. The findings provide real-world evidence that perceived racial threats increase demand for conservative media.