Princeton professor Markus Prior has written a new academic paper that upends the conventional wisdom that partisan channels like Fox News and MSNBC are to blame for the rise in political partisanship.

The problem with that argument, Prior reasons, is that very few people actually watch cable news — “no [more] than 10-15 percent of the voting age population.” That’s a steep drop from the 1960s and ’70s, when “even people with little interest in news and politics watched network newscasts because they were glued to the set and there were no real alternatives to news in many markets during the dinner hour.”

The sea change wasn’t the rise of Fox News, it was the rise of other channels that offered something besides news. “The culprit turns out to be not Fox News, but ESPN, HBO, and other early cable channels that lured moderates away from the news and away from the polls,” Prior writes.