“Higher Fox News viewership increases incarceration
length, and the effect is stronger for black defendants and for drug-related
crimes,” wrote Elliot Ash, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Law, Economics, and
Data Science at ETH Zurich, and Michael Poyker, Ph.D., a postdoctoral
researcher at Columbia University.
Building on the assumption that “greater
exposure to partisan television news has an impact on voting in presidential
elections and congressional position-taking,” the study authors scrutinized
whether partisan news has an effect on judges’ rulings, scrutinizing data on
almost 7 million criminal sentencing decisions in the United States for the
years 2005 to 2017.
Their conclusion: “Conservative television media
exposure has a causal effect on judge decision-making.”
To research their paper, “Conservative News Media
and Criminal Justice: Evidence from Exposure to Fox News Channel,” Ash and
Poyker used word clouds, compared national sentencing data, and examined Fox
viewership.
“We use combined microdata on criminal sentencing
decisions from the National Corrections Reporting Program and a unique dataset
with the universe of sentencing decisions linked to judge biographies from ten
states … paired with data on cable news viewership at the county level,” they
wrote.
Conservative-news watching had no measurable effect
on appointed judges, according to the research paper.
“The appointed judges have tenure, and therefore
face minimal political pressures once in office,” Ash and Poyker wrote. “We
find that Fox News increases sentencing only for elected judges. Voters might
become more conservative due to Fox News exposure, and in particular due to
media attention on felony cases.
Meanwhile, lawyers/prosecutors put active pressure
on judges threatening to find candidates to displace then; that would increase
electoral pressures on judges to be harsher in sentencing decisions.”
The study authors trained word2vec, a popular
word embedding model, on transcripts for Fox, CNN, and MSNBC, for the years
2001 through 2013. “This model works by reading through sentences and locating
words close to each other in a vector space if they tend to occur in similar
contexts (that is, windows of neighboring words). Similarity between words
can then be measured using the cosine of the angle between the vector
representations of each word.
In the transcripts data, the most similar words to
‘crime’ were ‘crimes,’ ‘murder,’ ‘homicide,’ ‘perpetrator,’ ‘felonies,’ and
other synonyms or closely related terms.”
Ash and Poyker took sentencing data from the National Corrections Reporting Program (NCRP) that
contains information for “all prison admissions in the United States from 2000
to 2014.” NCRP’s data was cross-referenced with sentencing data from a previous
study done by Poyker and
Dippel (2019)because of its case-level detail of accessible judge’s
information.
From there, Ash and Poyker only used data from 10
states with judges’ information in the case files. Those states are Alabama,
Colorado, Georgia, Kentucky, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania,
Tennessee, Virginia, and Washington.
“We establish a racial bias in the effect of
conservative discourse on criminal justice decisions, and this is linked to
drug crimes,” they wrote. “As Blacks are disproportionately arrested for
non-violent drug related offenses, the effect could be driven by racial bias in
media messaging. Alternatively, it could be that ‘tough-on-drugs’ rather than
‘tough-on-crime’ rhetoric matters in this setting.”
Ash and Poyker looked at viewership based on Nielsen’s channel positions
and ratings analytics that categorized viewership with zip codes. (Ctrl-F
Media Data)
Interestingly, the effect of Fox News on
elected judges becomes weaker in the run-up to the election date, according to
this report.
“One interpretation of this result is that
politicized information and politicized incentives are substitutes, rather than
complements. As electoral pressures become stronger, media effects are reduced.
Another possibility is that Fox News content becomes
more election-focused, and less devoted to crime, in the run-up to elections.”
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