While it’s widely believed that access to Fox News helps Republicans looking for stardom among the party’s loyal voters, some of the latest data seem to buck that conventional wisdom.
A few months ago, Media Matters for America, the nonprofit liberal watchdog that monitors “misinformation” in conservative media, began its “Fox News primary.” The project’s intent was to track each Republican presidential candidate’s interview airtime on the network to show which ones might be receiving coveted free exposure from a friendly media outlet.
But the group’s data shows there’s no clear line from Fox News exposure to a rise in the national polls.
The Media Matters project shows that Trump has far and away received the most interview airtime between May 1 and Oct. 25, which matches Trump’s dominance in many of the national polls over the last few months.
But the group’s data show Mike Huckabee is in second when it comes to time on Fox News, followed by Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson, and that’s not at all how the candidates stand in the national polls.
Carson, not Huckabee, is firmly in second place with 22 percent behind Trump’s 27 percent according to an average of some of the latest polls. According to some new polls, Carson is now leading Trump across the country, and pulled off that feat while getting about one third of the time on Fox that Trump received.
And even though Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., doesn’t make the top five on Fox News, he’s in third place nationally, with 9 percent.
Many who are scoring a reasonable amount of Fox News time aren’t rating that high nationally. Christie is in third when it comes to face time on the network, but is a distant tenth place nationally, at 2 percent.
Thomas Patterson, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and expert on media and politics, said airtime on Fox likely still has an impact on the popularity of some of the candidates. He said, however, that a large part of it depends on the name recognition of candidate before he or she announced his or her campaign.
“Most of the these candidates are fighting to extend their name recognition,” Patterson said. “So, if someone has a larger reputation beforehand, it doesn’t matter all that much about the coverage they get.”
Several of the candidates did have massive name recognition before entering the race, most notably Donald Trump, who has been a national celebrity for decades and whose profile was boosted by hosting a popular reality show on network TV for several years.
Trump was also a frequent guest on Fox News, with his own, unofficial weekly phone-in segment on the morning show “Fox and Friends.”
Carson, Huckabee, John Kasich and Rick Santorum were all also employed by Fox at one point. But though Huckabee has appeared on the network the second-most times in the May to October time frame, he is polling nationally in seventh place with 4 percent.
Even so, much of Fox’s programming is widely seen as an ally to Republicans, offering them the opportunity to get their messages out to conservative voters unfiltered.
At the start of the primary season this year, Fox host Sean Hannity secured many of the candidates’ first post-announcement interviews. For that, a report at Politico in June dubbed Hannity “kingmaker.”
In April, CNN media reporter Brian Stelter said there’s “no disputing Fox’s power in influencing the GOP.”
Patterson, the Harvard professor, said the relationship between the number of a candidate’s appearances on Fox News and his or her poll numbers is imperfect but “undeniable.”
