What Makes Fox News So Persuasive? It Might Not Be What You Think.

What if Fox News’s real power isn’t politics, but psychology?

When marketing professor Ray Charles “Chuck” Howard moved from Canada to Texas in 2020, in the thick of the pandemic, he didn’t set out to study American media — he just happened to turn on the TV.

“I became instantly fascinated with the way Fox presents the news,” he says.

Howard began jotting down notes on what made Fox different and digging into the research. But one question kept nagging at him: What makes Fox so persuasive?

A few years — and nearly a million headlines later — he thinks he has part of the answer. It lies in the language of fear.

“Fear influences our judgment and decision-making in powerful ways,” says Howard, an associate professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.

In his new study, “Audience Behavior Parallels Systematic Differences in Fear-Based Language on Fox News and CNN,” Howard and his co-authors analyzed how the two cable networks used fear during the pandemic — and how those subtle differences may help explain how Fox News exerts a far greater influence on people’s beliefs and behaviors than CNN, as research has shown.

The research offers a counter-narrative to two widely held explanations for Fox News’ influence: that its audience is more vulnerable to partisan bias or misinformation, and that its opinion content, from talk show hosts such as Sean Hannity, drives its persuasive power.

How the Study Worked

Howard and his collaborators at Texas A&M and the University of Colorado Boulder started by creating a free, publicly available database of 997,902 headlines from cnn.com and foxnews.com published between January 2020 and January 2022.

“We looked specifically at headlines, because most people only read headlines,” says Howard.

As the researchers note, “Emotional tone, linguistic framing, and language can powerfully influence people’s perceptions, attitudes, and actions. Headlines, especially, are often the most widely consumed and memorable element of a news story, framing the reader’s interpretation even when the full article is not read.”

The team classified the headlines into seven news topics, including the pandemic itself (for example, its origin, hospitalization rates, and death toll); vaccine side effects (that is, health outcomes following vaccination); and vaccine mandates (for example, schools requiring students to be vaccinated before returning to class).

The researchers note these categories were chosen for two reasons. First, the topics are highly consequential: more than 1 million Americans died because of COVID-19, and it’s estimated that more than 300,000 lives could have been saved if every eligible U.S. resident had been vaccinated at their earliest opportunity.

Second, it is not well understood how Fox News, the cable channel Rupert Murdoch launched in 1996, influenced compliance with public health measures, vaccine hesitancy or vaccination rates.

They classified each headline as hard news or opinion to test whether fear effects appear in the ostensibly fact-based reporting that most people rely on for credible information. And then, using natural language processing, the researchers compared the amount and frequency of fear-based language on each site across the categories.

A Pandemic That Didn’t Scare Fox

So, what did they find?

Fox News used more fear than CNN, on average, but used less fear than CNN in its COVID-19 pandemic coverage, and more fear in its vaccine side effect and mandate coverage.

“What was most interesting about that is that Fox didn't treat the COVID-19 pandemic with any more fear than the regular news, whereas CNN treated it with substantially more fear than the regular news,” says Howard.

But when vaccines arrived, the pattern flipped: Fox covered vaccine side effects with about as much fear as it did the pandemic itself.

“So, the potentially lifesaving vaccine that you could take to benefit yourself and society was handled with as much fear as the pandemic that was actually killing millions of people around the world,” says Howard. “The opposite was true on CNN. There was substantially less fear in their vaccine-related headlines than in their general or pandemic headlines.”

Howard says he wasn’t surprised to learn that Fox had more fear in its headlines about vaccine side effects and mask mandates than CNN. But what did surprise him was that Fox had roughly the same amount of fear in its vaccine-related headlines as in its pandemic headlines — and even its general news.

“If we assume that fear language is an editorial choice, then one way to interpret our findings is that Fox News thought you should be as scared of the pandemic as you should be of day-to-day life, and that you should be as scared of the vaccine as you should be of the pandemic,” he says. “And that is unusual to me. A global pandemic that's killing millions of people is, to me, something you should be more fearful of than the average news story. And, in my opinion, potential vaccine side effects are far less frightening than a global pandemic.”

The ’Chicken Little’ Effect: Fear by Frequency

Interestingly, Fox achieved higher levels of overall fear by publishing more fear-laced headlines than CNN, not by using an extraordinary amount of fear per headline, the research found.

“The ‘Fox fear’ effect is about frequency,” says Howard. “That makes sense if you consider the ‘Chicken Little’ effect: if you're just shouting from the rooftops — BE AFRAID! BE AFRAID! — at some point people are going to tune you out. But if you're using a reasonable amount of fear, and you're doing it on a really frequent basis, it stands to reason that you'll be more persuasive.”

(The parable of Chicken Little warns against panic and exaggeration, after a bird mistakenly believes the sky is falling.)

This all begs the question: Did Fox’s headlines make its audience more vaccine- and mask-resistant?

“These findings offer a plausible explanation for Fox News viewers’ lower compliance with public health measures and lower vaccination rates, and may help explain how Fox News generally exerts such strong influence,” the researchers write.

In the end, it came down to how the audiences responded.

“What fear is really effective at is creating threat avoidance,” says Howard. “One way to think about our results is that it makes sense that CNN’s audience was more likely to comply with social distancing and mask mandates and get vaccinated because they wanted to avoid the harm caused by COVID-19. And it makes sense that Fox's audience was more likely to avoid these things because they saw them as a potentially greater source of harm than the pandemic itself.”

This pattern fits within what psychologists call Protection Motivation Theory — the idea that fear can either motivate protective action or trigger avoidance, depending on how people perceive the threat and their ability to respond.

Howard cautions about drawing causal connections. “Ultimately, the paper is descriptive,” he says. “We can't connect the level of fear in the headlines directly to people's behavior. We think this study provides a plausible explanation that requires future research to establish the causal connection.”

Why Marketers Should Care

Understanding what makes Fox so persuasive may seem at first like a topic for media scholars. But Howard says it is also a question for marketing scholars to answer — and they are uniquely well-positioned to answer it.

“We are well-versed not only in the econometric methods that help identify the media’s effect on people, but also in the psychology of persuasion and decision-making,” he says.

Marketing, he adds, is about “informing the way people think and feel about a brand or product.” But in this case, the brands weren’t Nike, Adidas or Reebok; they were Pfizer, Moderna and even organizations like the CDC. And the products were far more consequential than running shoes, they were public health guidance and vaccines.

Ultimately, Howard’s research underscores that how a story is told can be as important as the story itself.

Ray Charles “Chuck” Howard is co-author of the working paper, “Audience Behavior Parallels Systematic Differences in Fear-Based Language on Fox News and CNN,” with Buffy N. Mosley of Texas A&M University, Ty Longmire-Monford of the University of Colorado Boulder, and Sarah Etier, a marketing consultant.