But can you use it in a sentence?

I don't know where your tipping point was, but I started to tire of election post-mortems about last Thursday. Like public opinion surveys, what's exciting about them isn't usually very valid, and what's valid about them isn't usually very exciting. Whether old media or new media, they tend toward the sort of see-you-shoulda-listened-to-me brand-building that ages poorly. (And -- actual southerner here -- I'd be happy if the broadcast oligarchs of 2026 tell James Carville to just go stick his head in a barrel and yell for a while.*)

So above is a morning-after lede from the AP for your consideration, offered less as a diagnosis than as a way of thinking about what news could look like over the ensuing months and years. What struck me, as an old paid-to-read-this-stuff hand from back in the Carter administration, was how unusual it seems to see "Trump" and "felony conviction" in the same paragraph -- compared with, say, the number of times you saw "Biden" close to "disastrous debate" in AP stories in the past five months.** That points us toward some conclusions about how the agenda-setting paradigm, and what we know about media effects in general, can help attack the conventional wisdom.

My starting point is some of the self-justifying blather I'm seeing on the right flank: People weren't fooled -- they knew exactly what they were voting for, and that's what they wanted. I agree that a large proportion of US voters knew exactly who they were voting for: the lying, gropey, vengeful old clown who thinks all the world's a sound stage and hates all the people they wish they could hate. What they were voting for is a different question, and that's where Fox News comes into the equation.

We've known for two decades that Fox users are more likely than users of grownup media to believe in things that aren't so. Kull et al (2003) looked at beliefs about justifications for the second US-Iraq war: presence of WMD, strong Qa'ida-Iraq links, and worldwide support for a US invasion. Fox users were the most likely to hold at least one misperception; public media users (and in those glorious days, newspaper readers) the least likely to hold any misperceptions.

Because it doesn't hit the usual metrics of polling drama during campaign season (see above, under sexy vs. valid), you might not have seen an October survey from Ipsos that looked at the relationship between news source and political understanding. Unsurprisingly, participants who get their news from Fox and other right-wing outlets saw immigration as the most important problem facing the country; for participants overall, it was the economy; in the category of national newspapers and (non-Fox) cable, the MIP was "political extremism or threats to democracy."

Those are attitudes, but my favorite takeaway from a McCombs and Shaw retrospective 20 years into the agenda-setting enterprise (sorry if I've been harping on this one for the past few months) is that attitude change isn't the most relevant outcome of media coverage. Indeed, as M&S suggest, if you're looking  for attitude change, you're likely to miss a bigger effect, which is the transfer of knowledge -- in this survey, the number of things you don't believe that are true. Leaving aside that pesky democracy, Fox users were the most likely to give the wrong answer to true-false questions on two of their "most important" issues, inflation and US-Mexico border crossings, as well as one about FEMA withholding aid from hurricane victims.

What does that have to do with Trump and his felonies? With the mythical green eyeshade firmly in place, I can imagine a lot of editorial justifications: we've already reported that, everybody knows it already, and it's off topic because we write about The Issues around here. Sure, if we gave a true-false test to random people, we could probably find a good number who answered "yes" to a question about Trump and felonies.*** But in priming terms -- what's the first folder you find when you open the mental filing cabinet to help you process a fresh story? -- that's not the kind of knowing you get from seeing it every day at the top of the story at the top of the broadcast.

Same with what you learn about the economy. Granted, a trip to the grocery holds a lot of lessons about grocery prices, but those angry Fox users are also more likely to "know" that gas prices haven't gone down, even when they're the ones paying less per gallon at the pump. That gets to how big a story inflation is. Like nonfarm payroll job creation, inflation is a "calendar" event; we get a monthly report from the government, and depending on your work-life balance, you might even hear it on drive-time radio on your way to the office.

Or not. At the Fox homepage, the monthly consumer inflation report was a big deal for most of 2022. From January through August, it was among the top five stories at least once during the day it was released. (It could also produce more than one "unique" story.) As inflation drifted downward from its peak (around 9%), the story lost air; from September through February 2023, the monthly report doesn't make the cut.****

The stream of data isn't necessarily clearer in the professional press. "Even though there are signs inflation is receding, it has still been at record levels for some time," the local paper I read every day proclaimed in June 2023 -- though COVID-era inflation had never been within artillery range of even the post-World War II record and, as Fox apparently noticed, had already fallen far enough to lose some of its utility as a weapon.

What does information mean in real life? Ipsos participants who answered true/false questions about inflation, crime, the border and the stock market correctly intended to vote for Harris; participant who got those questions wrong leaned toward Trump. The news hasn't told people what to think; it has, in the line M&S borrowed from Bernard Cohen, affected the balance of what they think about and how hard  they think about it.

If you're the kind that stays up late and watches speeches all the way through, you might have heard Kamala Harris drop a "two-state solution" line at the Democratic convention. Granted, advocating a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine issue is an exceptionally low bar to clear, but how might reporting from college campuses -- or Dearborn or Hamtramck -- look if the audience knew how many of the major-party candidates had cleared it? (And given the sorts of folks who are tipped to be in charge of foreign policy in the incoming administration, might that have been a useful difference?)

Again -- and call it a straw figure if you like -- I can anticipate some responses: That's not what we do. We just report on what happened. We can't put a thumb on the scales.***** To which the stack of "disastrous debate" coverage suggests: You already do. It's literally your job to assess salience and to put information into a context that allows the audience to make meaningful use of it. The question now is whether you're going to use both thumbs.

* As John Duffey would have had it: Bless his heart and all his vital organs.
** Bear in mind that the Trump total includes, for example, one of the man accused of trying to kill him. 
*** Not to dogpile or anything, but -- see how easy it is to get them into the same sentence?
**** This cut of the data stops at the beginning of March 2023, when Fox made some big tweaks to the homepage presentation.
***** At Fox, of course, card-stacking is exactly the point.