being here. freight talking with you. we will keep covering this story in our nightly reliable sources newsletter. up next, what happens to fox viewers when they stop watching the necessary work? two researchers found out by paying fox fanatics to switch to cnn. the results are in and we have them next. here, safe driving saves more than just your cargo. safe driving saves you 40% with drivewise. the safer you drive, the more you save with allstate. click or call for a quote today. life can be a lot to handle. this magic moment but heinz knows there s plenty of magic in all th chaos. so different and so new was like any other. i book our hotel on kayak.
just good for one side. this is what president obama is getting at. if you think of fox news as just kind of putting a thumb on the scale for republicans, you know, its that, but it s not only that. i think it s bad for democracy because it actually matters a lot if trump voters during the trump presidency think that trump is doing a great job or just kind of a good job because if voters don t learn when politicians on their side mess up, then there s no one to hold politicians accountability. so it matters a lot to have during the presidency trump voters to say we like you but you need to do this better. or during the biden presidency we need biden voters to say we like you overall but you need to be doing petr in this way. partisan media doesn t tell its own side when a politician is not performing up to snuff or doesn t talk about their failings, that really breaks town some of the key mechanisms that keep our democracy responsive. having a side s own voters tell their side you need
viewers to get a realistic picture of the world we need viewers to see all types of information and unfortunately what we find in the study is that the viewers don t want to engage in watching all sides. so as david mentioned, we see that viewers we pay them for four weeks to watch cnn, but then after those payments stop they go back to watching fox news. even though we try to incentivize viewers to watch both fox and cnn they don t want to engage in that hard work, they want to really just watch the side that makes them feel good and this is why the media has such an important responsibility to cover both sides, to hold both parties accountable. and this story has gotten a lot of attention. president obama mentioned it on stage at the attic and university of chicago disinformation conference that i was at in chicago this week. here is what are the of what obama said about your study. it hadn t turned them into liberals, it didn t make them want to vote for joe biden.
is fox viewers are in the dark about bad news for the gop. that s right. fox and cnn cover different issues and fox news predominantly covers issues that make the gop look good and make democrats look bad. on the flip side cnn engages in this partisan coverage filtering as well. for example, during this time the abraham accords were signed and the agreements where israel, the uae and bahrain signed a major piece agreement. fox news covered this major accomplishment 15 times more than cnn did. both networks are encouraging in this partisan coverage filtering it s not about one side, it s about the media writ large. i think you re engaging in both sidesism there, josh. not trying to lay out a moral equivalency, it s not about what an objective standard s it s really about how all networks do engage in this and in order for
they had just had access to a different set of information. i think we underestimate the degree of plyability in our opinions, in our views. david, is that the proper take away here? is obama right? yeah, i think that gets at a really important finding of our study which is that, first of all, president obama is exactly right, we are not finding that you take fox viewers and all of a sudden overnight they become biden voters. that wasn t the goal of our study and we weren t expect to find that and we didn t, but we do find that consistent with what i was saying earlier, when folks who previously watched fox news started watching cnn they learn all these things they didn t know before about, for example, the fact that the u.s. at the time was not doing as well as many other countries when it came to controlling covid, things like fox news didn t want to say. fox news was telling people that covid is not as big of a deal. i think that the key implication here is that we really should