There is a correlation between watching Fox News and backing Trump, but it’s not clear if there’s causation, or which way that causation might point. Fox News is understood to be a conservative counterweight to the traditional “liberal” media, meaning that many Republicans chose the network as their preferred outlet well before the Trump era. (In the Suffolk poll, 56 percent of Republicans pick Fox as their most trusted network, to 5 percent of Democrats and 20 percent of independents.) In the Trump era, the Republicans who were already watching Fox announce that they support Trump.
As it stands, two-thirds of Trump’s support comes from people who say that Fox News is their most-trusted news source, to a fifth of Clinton’s that comes from MSNBC.
What would likely happen if you took away Fox News is that the red bars for the other networks would grow larger. (If you took away MSNBC, the blue bars would grow larger, but not by as much.) The story is likely one of symbiosis more than of either Fox or Trump making the other happen. But that symbiosis is much stronger than one might have assumed.
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