I think people typically flip the causality here. People's voting isn't determined by their media habits, but rather their media habits are determined by their voting. For instance in these cable news discussions, Fox is often a huge target. But if you covertly turned Fox into the NYTimes tomorrow, you'd have 0 impact on election outcomes. All you'd end up doing is creating a vacuum that'd probably be filled by OANN or another similar network.

Tucker Carlson is another great example. There was a segment of people who were loudly rejoicing after he was fired from Fox. But it predictably had a less than zero effect on his visibility, as he now gets vastly more viewers than he did on Fox by running his segments independently. People weren't watching Tucker because of Fox, they were watching Fox because of Tucker. And, in turn, the people watching Tucker aren't just adopting his views - but rather tend to watch him because they have comparable worldviews themselves. If his worldview suddenly turned into that of Rachel Maddow overnight, all that'd happen is his viewership would also trend to zero.

---

Just think about yourself. Do you honestly think you're going to go start supporting the current administration if you just freebased a few thousand hours of Fox, OANN, or whatever else? Our fundamental views are shaped very slowly and more from things like life experience than headlines, which is a big part of the reason that age is such a large factor in typical ideology.

It goes both ways; there's a feedback. People start watching a channel because they're predisposed to agree with it, but when the channel constantly reinforces their biases, it foes from a slight predisposition to a strong opinion to an absolute certainty.

Fox News doesn't just give a conservative opinion on events, but constantly asserts that every other information source is wrong. Not just wrong, in fact, but a deliberate attempt to con them.

You're correct that eliminating Fox News would not, in itself, end that process. They've had decades to reinforce their views. It may well be inescapable at this point.

But OANN isn't as slick as Fox News. It doesn't attract people with a predisposition; it's more likely to turn them off. If Fox News were to disappear, and OANN expand to fill its space, it might eventually reduce the number of people drawn into that self-reinforcing mechanism.