Yes, watching Fox does make you more conservative

What decided the 2000 election? A few hanging chads? The Supreme Court? Or was it Fox News? A new working paper from Emory University's Gregory Martin and Stanford University's Ali Yurukoglu argues that former President George W. Bush's popular vote total would have been 1.6 percentage points lower in his race against former Vice President Al Gore if Fox had not launched four years earlier.

The paper provides new evidence that Fox and MSNBC have a real influence on how their audiences are likely to vote. The fact that Republicans are more likely to watch Fox and Democrats to watch MSNBC is a chicken-and-egg problem. To be sure, people prefer to watch anchors and commentators whose views they already agree with, but do the channels actually make their viewers more liberal or conservative as well?