































ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE V 

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DOES POLITICAL BALANCE 

EXIST IN FOX NEWS’ COV-

ERAGE? 
 

NIANLONG DAI, PROFESSOR BETH LEECH 

 

✵ ABSTRACT 
In the era of media prosperity, Fox News, as 

the most significant political news provider in the 
United States (According to Pew Research Center’s 
research, 16 percent of participants consider Fox 
News their primary source of political news, which is 
higher than any other media), influences the politi-
cal orientation of voters to manipulate election re-
sults through various means, such as overemphasiz-
ing, reporters’ interpreting, and disregarding news, 
etc. In order to make their reporting seem more ob-
jective and reliable, politically biased media may 
gain credibility for themselves by covering more 
news with different political perspectives during 
non-significant times, which is called political bal-
ancing. In order to verify whether political balancing 
exists in the mainstream media, sixty Fox News re-
ports during the period of 2016 election were ran-
domly selected and analyzed. According to the re-
sult, Fox News put statistically significant more pos-
itive coverage of Democrats after the Republican 
candidate, Donald Trump, won the 2016 election. 
The findings of this research are substantial since 
awareness of the media’s political balancing will 
benefit voters in making rational choices for conse-
quential elections. Meanwhile, political balancing 
could be necessary for researchers conducting 
studies of journalism.  

 

1  INTRODUCTION 
The news media, as the main, or even the 

only, way for the general public citizens to obtain in-
formation about government and social issues, is 
deeply influenced by a small number of people, in-
cluding journalists, government officials, and 

various interest groups. Although public opinion 
plays a vital role during the election and decision-
making process in the United States, the perspec-
tive of citizens could be easily affected, and the most 
significant influential factor will be the news media. 
In other words, elites’ leverage in media coverage 
allows them to achieve their goal of controlling the 
government by influencing the political views of vot-
ers. The media influences political affairs through 
different attitudes. When the press reports posi-
tively about a policy, its readers are more likely to 
support it. Conversely, readers are more likely to 
oppose the issue if the news media express a nega-
tive attitude towards that issue. However, the reality 
of media-driven voting severely damaged the func-
tioning of the democratic system since voters are 
going to vote for propaganda masters instead of 
political experts. In order to alleviate the media’s 
domination of public opinion, people need to real-
ize that the news media coverage may be biased or 
deceptive.  

However, these biases are not straightfor-
ward enough to easily detect since news media are 
going to conceal their political leanings in order to 
make them seem objective and impartial. One of 
the crucial ways news media use to express objec-
tivity is balancing between major political powers, 
the Democrats and Republicans. Therefore, it is 
highly possible for news outlets with clear political 
leanings (such as Fox News and New York Times) to 
publish more stories that are beneficial to other po-
litical parties during unimportant time periods in or-
der to gain the public trust of their entire coverage. 
In order to verify whether the news media will bal-
ance between political powers by increasing posi-
tive coverage of other political parties, I conducted 
research on whether Fox News put more positive 
coverage of Democrats to balance between politi-
cal powers after Donald Trump won the 2016 presi-
dential election.  

 

2 LITERATURE REVIEW  
Political bias in the media has been a severe 

problem for more than a hundred years, even be-
fore the establishment of the modern news industry. 
According to David Abrahamson’s article, The Rise 



ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE V 

 

of The New Partisan Press: Forward into the past, “a 
politically biased from journalism was dominant be-
fore the advent of the penny press in the 1830s” 
(Abrahamson, 2006, p.2). Based on Abrahamson’s 
research, there is a clear trend of an increasing num-
ber of politically biased news with the development 
of various media, from traditional newspapers to ra-
dio news, television news, and even current social 
media news. The article went through the history of 
non-partisan news, which was widespread across 
the nation for a couple of decades in the late 19th 
century but eventually corroded and replaced by 
partisan, biased news. Therefore, Abrahamson’s re-
search proved that politically biased news had been 
a serious problem, and it will not disappear with the 
emergence of new media like Twitter. On the con-
trary, news industries will keep expanding their in-
fluence in our political system, which explains the in-
creasing frequency of politically biased news in 
mainstream media. 

By assessing its readers’ political affiliations, 
we can determine the political preference of a me-
dia outlet. Based on the Pew Research Center’s sur-
vey of mainstream media readers, most of the main-
stream media has a large portion of readers identi-
fying themselves as affiliated with a specific political 
party. Suppose a great portion of readers of a media 
outlet identifies themselves with the same political 
party. In that case, it indicates that this media tends 
to include more positive coverage of that specific 
party since people are much more willing to read 
those articles they agree with. According to Jeff 
Grabmeier’s research, people are more likely to 
choose to focus on stories that reinforce their origi-
nal views because “they don’t want their views to be 
challenged by seriously considering other view-
points” (Grabmeier). Among those biased media, 
Fox News and New York Times are the most typical 
examples in which most of its readers are affiliated 
with the same political party. The Pew survey shows 
that 93 percent of Fox News readers identify them-
selves as Republicans, while 91 percent of New York 
Times readers identify themselves as Democrats. 
Since this survey allows us to identify mainstream 
media’s political preference, it will be significant to 

tell whether the news media carried out a political 
balance in its coverage.  

The 2016 presidential election is the best 
example of studying the crucial role of the news me-
dia plays in the political system of the United States 
since the influence of the media on election results 
was most evident in the 2016 election.  Furthermore, 
Donald Trump’s campaign’s heavy investment in the 
media industry (According to CNN’s estimates, the 
Trump campaign spent more than $100 million on 
ads during the 2016 election) and the 2016 election 
results demonstrated the significance of the news 
media, including traditional media and social media, 
in influencing public voting preference. According 
to Qihao Ji’s research article, Moralizing Campaign 
Coverage: A Computerized Textual Analysis of New 
York Times’ Reporting on Clinton and Trump During 
the 2016 Presidential Election, the New York Times’s 
relatively neutral and objective coverage of the 
election process and candidates may have been the 
main reason Hillary Clinton lost that consequential 
election. Based on the computerized analysis of ex-
tensive news articles during the period of 2016 
presidential election, the New York Times, as the 
main propaganda outlet for the Democratic Party, 
displays a greater degree of neutrality than Fox 
News. As the election date approached, more and 
more news about the election was being sent out. 
Meanwhile, Trump’s approval rate continued to 
climb, and he defeated Clinton on election day and 
became the 45th president of the United States, 
which proves that Republican coverage, Fox News, 
is more effective in winning the election. Therefore, 
Ji’s research implies that biased news is more likely 
to affect readers’ minds than neutral stories. In addi-
tion, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and other 
“Blue States”, state that typically vote for Democratic 
candidates, chose to support Trump in 2016 elec-
tion, which shows that neutral reports cannot even 
consolidate their views of the original supporters.  

In the current news media, especially the 
periods before election dates, there has been a 
great number of politically biased news that contain 
slander and smearing content of the candidate from 
the other party. The article, How American Media 
Framed 2016 Presidential Election Using Data 



ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE V 

 

Visualization, by Iuliia Alieva mentioned that the vis-
ualization of data led to an escalation of the media 
war, as these visualizations of charts and data por-
trait the election as an adversarial game. In other 
words, candidates of different political parties will 
no longer be portrayed as friends who hold differ-
ent political perspectives but as enemies (the most 
prominent example of a game-like campaign is the 
2016 presidential election). Therefore, the current 
situation of severe polarization in American politics 
has forced different parties to conduct more influ-
ential ways of political propaganda, which include 
more offensive content, such as the coverage of po-
litical scandals. In order to make the “game” look 
more intense, some media even fabricate fake news 
during the campaign to attract readers’ attention. 
Based on Hunt Allcott and Mathew Gentzkow’s re-
search on news in the 2016 election, nearly every 
American adult read at least one fake news story 
during the 2016 campaign, and more than half of 
them expressed their profound belief in those fake 
news. However, even if the news has been proven 
to be a false accusation, the price paid by the media 
could be nothing more than an apology or compen-
sation, while the public pressure those fake news 
created during the campaign may lead to election 
failures. Of course, the news media could reach the 
same goal by reporting facts in different ways, such 
as over-emphasizing, obfuscating reports, and con-
ducting interpretive reports. Therefore, we should 
be cautious about the news that contains radical 
views on a certain political party or candidate (no 
matter positive or negative) since it is important for 
us as voters to distinguish possible biased news to 
make reasonable choices.  

Qun Wang includes his research on post-
election self-examination of the entire news industry 
in his article, Problems and Solutions for American 
Political Coverage. Wang finds out that most of the 
news media are going to have a post-election self-
examination on the “individual, routine, organiza-
tion, institutional, and social system level” (Wang, 
2018, p.4) of their reports during the election to see 
if they complied with the duties of journalists, re-
porting with a objective and unbiased perspective. 
However, Wang’s research shows that the reflection 

among news media “focused more on the routine 
level while problems at individual and organiza-
tional levels were not prominently examined” 
(Wang), which indicates that the severe problem of 
political bias in articles during elections has not 
been taken seriously. However, in order to gain 
more leverage among the entire journalism indus-
try, news media must make themselves more objec-
tive to be accepted by more of the general public, 
which may be the reason for the increasing number 
of positive reports on the opponent’s political party 
after the election.  

David Nicholas Hopmann introduces the 
concept of media balance in his article, Political Bal-
ance in the News: A review of concepts, operational-
izations and key findings, which points out that me-
dia coverage, especially coverage of elections, 
should focus more on factual content and treating 
each candidate with the same standard. Also, Hop-
mann argues that election news should be done by 
neutral nonpartisan journalists while receiving 
standard regulations. This article was significant 
since it gives a possible explanation for a limited 
number of neutral and objective news media in the 
United States—the two-party political system. Ac-
cording to Hopmann’s research, the severe prob-
lem of politically biased news also occurs “in coun-
tries with only two viable prime minister candidates” 
(Hopmann, 2012, p.1), just like in the United States. 
Therefore, biased media exist as a common prob-
lem among two-party system countries like the 
United States, and if the media change its attitude 
toward the opposing political party after the elec-
tion, it is not for the purpose of reporting the facts 
since such reports conflict with their own political in-
terests. The only reasonable explanation for such in-
terest-conflicted reports is that news outlets are try-
ing to balance between political powers. 

 

3 RESEARCH METHODS  
In order to test whether Fox News put more 

positive coverage of Democrats to balance between 
political powers after Donald Trump won the 2016 
presidential election, 60 news stories were col-
lected directly from the official website of Fox News.  



ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE V 

 

Because Fox News has a clear political pref-
erence, leaning toward the Republican Party, and 
played a decisive role in the 2016 presidential elec-
tion, I chose Fox News as my only source of news 
articles. Accordingly, this article is a targeted study 
of Fox News and does not imply similar problems 
that may exist among other news outlets. 

For my 60 stories, 30 stories were collected 
from four months before the election (07/08/2016 
to 11/08/2016), and the other 30 stories were col-
lected in the four months after the election 
(11/09/2016 to 03/09/2017) while every twentieth 
story was selected.  

In order to test Fox News’ attitude towards 
Democrats, I was thinking of using “Democrats” as 
my search keyword on Fox News’ official website. 
However, there are only two stories with the word 
Democrats in its title. Therefore, “Clinton” was being 
used as the search keyword since Clinton was the 
presidential candidate of the Democratic party in 
2016 and the majority of Fox News reports about  
Democratic policies, such as healthcare, the  

environment, abortion rights mentioned Clinton 
during the election period. Thus, “Clinton” could be 
the best proxy for the ways that Fox News portrays 
Democrats.  

Sixty selected news articles were coded and 
statistically analyzed from different aspects, includ-
ing their attitude towards Democrats, whether infor-
mation on Democrats’ political scandals was in-
cluded, and whether a reporter’s interpretation was 
included. One of the most significant factors is Fox 
News’ attitude towards Democrats, which was 
coded through interpretation of the tone of the 
news articles. Those articles are classified according 
to negative, neutral, or positive valence. Through 
the statistical analysis, if it turns out that Fox News 
has a better attitude toward the Democratic Party af-
ter the general election results, such as more posi-
tive reports or fewer mentions of the Democrats 
scandal, we will have evidence to conclude that Fox 
News is trying to balance between political after the 
general election powers.  
 

 

4 FINDINGS/RESULTS 
 

 
FIGURE 1 
 
Comparing news articles from two time pe-

riods (four months before and after the election 
day), the result of the content analysis shows that 
Fox News’ coverage of the Democrats’ political 
scandal significantly dropped after Trump won the 
election. According to the table above (FIGURE 1), 
there is 36.7 percent of Fox News articles contain 

content about the Democrat scandal, while most of 
them regarded either Hillary Clinton’s email contro-
versy or Bill Clinton’s Lewinsky scandal. However, 
the number of Fox News articles that included the 
Democrat scandal quickly dropped after the day 
Donald Trump won the election, which only ac-
counted for 13.3% of all Fox News articles.  



ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE V 

 

Reporting scandals about the opponent’s 
political party is one of the critical means used by 
politically affiliated media to politically attack the 
opposing party or candidate. These reports on the 
Democrat scandal are extremely negative for Dem-
ocrats because these reports and the harsh wording 
in articles, such as “criminal Clinton”, are devastat-
ing to the popularity and public opinion towards the 
Democratic Party. After the election, Fox News sub-
stantially reduced its coverage of the Democratic 
scandal, which is statistically significant since the 
value of Kendall’s tau-b is 0.03, which is smaller than 
0.05. Therefore, the smaller coverage of Democrats’ 
scandals is a sign that Fox News has turned its atti-
tude towards the Democrats better, and it is also a 
means of balancing between political powers.  

Another determinant variable to see if Fox 
News has attempted to balance political powers af-
ter the 2016 presidential election is its different atti-
tude toward the Democratic Party in articles in dif-
ferent periods of time. The diagram is shown in FIG-

URE 2 below.  
Before Trump won the election, there is 

66.7 percent of articles on Fox News held a negative 
attitude towards the Democratic party, which is two 
times more than Fox News articles that held a posi-
tive attitude towards the Democratic party.  

According to FIGURE 2, the proportion of pos-
itive articles about the Democratic party increased 
from 13.3% to 33.3%. Therefore, it is statistically sig-
nificant to conclude that Fox News had a much bet-
ter attitude towards the Democratic party since the 
value of Kendall’s tau-c for attitude versus time is 
0.005, which indicates that Fox News’ attitude to-
wards the Democrats has improved massively as the 
result of the election came out. Fox News’ uncharac-
teristically favorable attitude toward Democrats is 
evidence of its attempt to balance political power 
after publishing numerous biased stories before the 
election date.  

 
FIGURE 2 

 
The following diagram (FIGURE 3) shows the 

comparison of the interpretation level (the degree 
of independent analysis and creative liberty taken 
by a Fox writer) in Fox News articles before and after 
Trump won the election.  

FIGURE 3  
 
Based on the results of content analysis and 

the bar chart above (FIGURE 3), there is no statistically 
significant difference between the number of inter-
pretive news before and after the election day (Ken-
dall’s tau-b value: 0.883).  

Therefore, it is statistical confident to con-
clude that even though most Fox News stories be-
fore the election are meant to attack and harm the 
public credibility of the Democratic party, the major-
ity of the content of their news stories is event-
based. Furthermore, without statistically significant 
differences between the numbers of interpretive 
news before and after the election day indicates that 
political balance is not done by switching different 
types of news, but in more straightforward ways, 



ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE V 

 

such as reducing the number of times mentioning 
Democrats scandal or increasing the quantity of 
positive reporting towards Democrats.  

Overall, there is enough statistically signifi-
cant evidence to conclude that Fox News, as a typi-
cal partisan media affiliated with the Republican 
party, did put more positive coverage of Democrats 
in order to balance between political powers after 
the Republican candidate, Donald Trump, won the 
2016 presidential election.  

 

5 DISCUSSION/CONCLUSION  
Through the content analysis, we are statis-

tically confident that Fox News did publish reports 
that did not conform to the political interests of the 
Republican Party at unimportant time periods in or-
der to achieve political balance and express its prin-
ciple of objectivity. Since the data used in this study 
was only collected from Fox News, the results do not 
possess external validity. More research and relative 
data are necessary if it is to be proven that political 
balancing also exists among other news outlets. Ac-
cording to this research, the effect of the time pe-
riod on Fox News’ political attitudes was demon-
strated. Thus, further research on the modern news 
industry, especially Fox News, should be conducted 
during the time period when that media is in a criti-
cal competitive situation, such as the election pe-
riod. In this way, more effective analyses of media 
will be made, and the general public will better un-
derstand the actual intention contained in reports 
they are reading to make rational decisions that are 
in their best interests in the era of media flourish-
ing∎ 

 

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[3] Allcott, Hunt, and Matthew Gentzkow. 2017. "Social 
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https://doi.org/10.1353/jmm.2006.0007
https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2021.1930573
https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884911427804
https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2021.1976071
https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2017.1394209


ARESTY RUTGERS UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL, VOLUME I, ISSUE V 

 

Nianlong Dai graduated summa cum laude from the School of Arts and Sci-
ences at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, in May 2023, holding a B.A. in 
Political Science and a minor in Psychology. Under the guidance of Profes-
sor Beth Leech, Nianlong conducted an in-depth analysis of media behav-
ior during the 2016 presidential election and completed this research pa-
per. Over the course of four years in university, he developed an interest in 
political theory and engaged in targeted study of political viewpoints pro-
posed by various philosophers. Since graduation, he has been employed 
as a Political Analyst at a financial advisory corporation in New York City. In 
addition, he plans to pursue a law degree after a period of work and aspires 
to become a legal practitioner in his future career. 
 


