Assessing Fox News Exposure Across Platforms

Abstract

Exposure is the core construct of media effects research, but it is neither sufficiently measured nor well-understood in a multi-platform media system. We bring together data on Fox News consumption across television, foxnews.com, and four social media platforms in April 2022, supplemented by individual-level survey and web-tracking data from the American Media Exposure Survey (AMES). Direct engagement with Fox News is limited and highly concentrated across each platform. Yet, about half of Fox News consumers access its content through more than one platform, and the audiences reached on each platform differ demographically. Fox News’s social media presence is not a simple extension of its broadcasts. X (formerly Twitter) disproportionately elevates morning programming, while YouTube over-represents primetime opinion shows, meaning that platform choice alters both the volume and the substance of the content people consume. This offers one explanation for why media effects studies conducted on different platforms have produced conflicting results. Our results suggest that the empirical foundation of media effects research underestimates multi-modal consumption while overlooking how platforms transform the very content audiences consume.