Fox News uses 'hate' five times more often than competitors, study finds

Fox News uses the word “hate” five times more often than its main competitors, according to a new study – particularly when discussing opposition to Donald Trump.

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Robert Mathew Entman, professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, and Curd Knüpfer, assistant professor of political science at Freie Universität Berlin, studied more than 1,000 transcripts from “the two ideologically branded channels – rightwing Fox and leftwing MSNBC” in primetime, 6pm to 10.59pm, from 1 January to 8 May this year.

“We expected to find that both of the strongly ideological networks made use of such words,” they wrote for the Conversation, “perhaps in different ways. Instead, we found that Fox used antipathy words five times more often than MSNBC. ‘Hate’ really stood out: it appeared 647 times on Fox, compared to 118 on MSNBC.

“Fox usually pairs certain words alongside ‘hate’. The most notable was ‘they’ – as in, ‘they hate’. Fox used this phrase 101 times between January and May. MSNBC used it just five times.”

A Fox News anchor Chris Wallace will moderate Tuesday’s presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden at in Cleveland. Trump faced a famous grilling from Wallace this summer but he is notoriously fond of Fox News’ opinion hosts, reacting to their shows and open to their advice.

To put their findings in historic context, Entman and Knüpfer said, they searched for usage of the word “hate” in a database going back to 2009, adding CNN for context.

“We found Fox’s usage of ‘they hate’ has increased over time,” they wrote, “with a clear spike around the polarising 2016 Trump-Clinton election. But Fox’s use of ‘hate’ really took off when Trump’s presidency began. Beginning in January 2017, the mean usage of ‘they hate’ on the network doubled.”

The study found that when Fox News says “they hate”, it most often means “Democrats, liberals, political elites and the media”.

“As for the object of all this hatred, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and other Fox hosts most often name Trump. Anchors also identify their audience – ‘you’, ‘Christians’ and ‘us’ – as the target of animosity … these language patterns construct a coherent but potentially dangerous narrative about the world.”

In one famous example this summer, Carlson called Tammy Duckworth, a Democratic senator from Illinois who lost her legs when her helicopter was shot down in Iraq, “a deeply silly and unimpressive person” and “a coward” who “hates the country”.

The study did not only consider uses of “hate” by Fox News hosts, citing remarks by House minority leader Kevin McCarthy to Hannity on 13 February: “Democrats … don’t just hate the president, they hate you, they hate me, they hate the viewers. They hate everything about us.”

The authors pointed to Pew Research findings which say Republicans are likely to see Democrats as immoral or unpatriotic, and to trust Fox News more than other outlets.

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Fox’s use of the word “hate”, they said, represented a successful if “dangerous business plan when shared crises demand Americans’ empathy, negotiation and compromise. Fox’s talk of hate undermines democratic values like tolerance and reduces Americans’ trust of their fellow citizens.”

“This fraying of social ties helps explain America’s failures in managing the pandemic,” they said. More than 7m have been infected with the coronavirus in the US and more than 200,000 have died.

The professors said such division “bodes badly for its handling of what seems likely to be a chaotic, divisive presidential election. In pitting its viewers against the rest of the country, Fox News works against potential solutions to the the very crises it covers.”