How To Watch The GOP Debate Without Cable

On the off chance that you find yourself Thursday night with nothing to do and a burning desire to give yourself a migraine, Fox News (surprise, surprise) will be hosting the seventh Republican debate at 9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT, during which Megyn Kelly will once again ask the tough questions to frontrunner Donald Trump. If access to satellite TV or cable is a distant memory or phantasmal future dream, there are a wide variety of options available to watch the seventh GOP debate without cable.

Your best bet to watch the debate will be to head over to FoxNews.com for their livestream coverage. The Fox News Mobile app will also be featuring the livestream for those of you using a smartphone or tablet. If you happen to be on the road without access to the Internet, or if you find the sight of He Who Must Not Be Named to be so utterly repugnant that you've been running the Trump Filter browser extension in a vain effort to banish him from your Internet experience once and for all, tune into the local AM station Fox News Radio affiliate. Listening to the debate might also be an interesting way to experience the event and could even change your perception of the candidates.

Radio might seem like an odd choice in the intensely hyper-graphic media climate that is in existence today — you'll miss out on all the meme-able moments as they happen live — but the 1960 Kennedy/Nixon debates demonstrated that television viewers and radio listeners engage with the same event in different ways. James N. Druckman, currently a professor of political science at Northwestern University, concluded in a 2003 paper that viewers made additional value judgments about each of the candidates' integrity, while listeners tended to focus more on issues.

While not an indictment on television, as Druckman says in his conclusion "in some contexts, imagery may serve as useful information that enhances the quality of evaluations." If you're interested in testing out this hypothesis in your own life, try listening to the final debate before the Iowa caucuses (without checking Vine and Twitter too much) and compare notes with a friend who watched the debate on television or a livestream.

Finally, for those of you who enjoy politics and the company of others, check online to find debate watch parties sponsored by individual campaigns or civic groups. Better yet, plan your own watch party with fellow political junkies so that you can make sure everyone makes it through the whole two hours together in one piece.

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