When Dick Cheney left office with an approval rating of a robust 13 percent, it seemed nothing united Americans more than a good joke at Cheney’s expense. Association with the outgoing vice president meant political suicide, a fate John McCain desperately tried to avoid when his campaign politely requested that the Cheney skip the 2008 GOP convention.
Yet for all this derision, Americans by and large seem to have conformed to at least one of Cheney’s proclivities: wherever he traveled, Cheney required that his staff preset all televisions to Fox News. With the massive growth of partisan news media and political punditry, many now assume that we are all like Dick Cheney—that we live in self-reinforcing echo chambers and only engage with media that reinforces our own point of view.
But the alarmist warnings of the rise of partisan news organizations and their effect on American political discourse exaggerate the negative effects of partisan news selection. On the contrary, increased choice may increase partisanship not through the explosion of partisan media and acceptance of partisan thought, but rather through the growth of apolitical programming like ESPN and HBO, which has given viewers alternatives from traditional evening news sources and thus reduced political participation among traditional moderates and less partisan voters.
Rush Limbaugh and the New York Times are not mutually exclusive.
The first half of the traditional narrative generally goes something like this: people naturally like to have their beliefs reinforced, and thus, when given the choice to consume their news from a swath of outlets, prefer the more partisan narrative that more closely resembles their views. In an interview with the HPR, Rochester Institute of Technology Professor of Psychology Nicholas DiFonzo explained, “The Internet, [for example], is highly clustered with networks of like minded people. And when people are clustered together in a like-minded network, there tends to be an echo-chamber effect.” If this theory holds true, the societal implications of the growth in punditry and news polarization for American democracy and political discourse are enormous. Herein lies the second half of the narrative: by ignoring opposing views and having one’s partisan views validated, one gets more polarized as the marketplace of ideas ceases to function.
But to what extent are people visiting these partisan news sites and locking themselves in self-reinforcing echo chambers? Recent research suggests not to a large extent at all. R. Kelly Garret, an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication at the Ohio State University, in an interview with the HPR explained, “85 percent of Americans rely only on the mainstream media. A very small percentage of Americans actively seek out these very partisan news outlets as a primary source of news, and the people who do that also generally look at the mainstream outlets.” This inclination for traditional media appears to transcend both the Internet and television. According to research published by Sharad Goel, Assistant Professor at Stanford University in the Management Science & Engineering Department, polarizing articles from social media and web searches only account for 2 percent of total news consumption, and surveys from the Pew Research Center have found that even though 55 percent of Americans listed television as their main source of news, only a combined 9 percent listed Fox or MSNBC as their specific television news source. As Goel explained in an interview with the HPR, “The level of offline ideological segregation is equal to that of online.” That level, at best, is pretty minimal.
As such, whiledeological spectrum of news media has widened in recent years, most Americans remain near the middle. As Professor Markus Prior of Princeton University has noted, “Most of the largest news websites attract a similar amount of traffic from conservative, moderate, and liberal users.” And even the most partisan websites still maintain some audience diversity. Fifty percent of visitors to Rush Limbaugh’s website had also visited Yahoo! News in the same month, and thirty percent ventured as far as the New York Times. And of the visitors to the New York Times, thirty percent identify as conservative; similarly, around a fourth of Dailykos.com readers also read Foxnews.com. As Professor Garrett explained, “People have a preference for seeing their views reinforced, without having an aversion to encountering the other side.” The echo chamber, in other words, may not be so loud after all.
The Breakdown of the Silent Majority
Increased choice has, however, had a slightly polarizing effect in another way—not by changing attitudes, but by allowing politically apathetic citizens, who tend to be moderate, to disengage from the political system and drop out of the body politic. Before the growth in cable television and the Internet, mainstream evening news broadcasts took up the dinner hour. For those who didn’t share a specific interest in politics, they stayed in touch, gathered knowledge about politics, and were prompted to vote and participate politically via these traditional news broadcasts. With the growth in choice between so many entertainment and apolitical shows and sites, fewer apathetic citizens remain politically active. “Because there are more non-political choices now that did not exist before, like HBO or ESPN, you can spend a lot of time following good entertainment … and you don’t have to pick the news,” Professor Prior explained in an interview with the HPR, “The result is that there are fewer non-partisan people watching the news [since] they would rather watch some other form of entertainment.”
Empirically, several studies have confirmed these links between increased cable television penetration and decreased voter turnout. Professor Matthew Gentzkow of the University Chicago Booth School of Business, for example, has found that up to half of the aggregate decline of voter turnout since the 1950s can be explained by increased television choice. As Professor Prior summarized, “If you take people out of the news audience who would otherwise would have watched [the news] without caring too much about it, and these are non-partisan people … you are left with more partisan people who are going to the polls.” The change is thus not an increase in the polarization of the American public, but a decrease in the expression of people’s political voices, especially amongst those who are politically moderate or inactive.
The Polarized Are Speaking Up
Unsurprisingly, the polarized disproportionately dominate the political debate A series of Pew Research Center reports on polarization found that “those at both the left and right ends of the spectrum, who together comprise about 20% of the public overall, have a greater impact on the political process than do those with more mixed ideological views.” Specifically, roughly forty percent of ideologically consistent conservatives and thirty percent of ideologically consistent liberals “tend to drive political discussion.” These polarized citizens “talk about politics often, say others tend to turn to them for information rather than the reverse, and describe themselves as leaders rather than listeners in these kinds of conversations.” People with ideologically mixed views, however, act the same way only twelve percent of the time. These consistent conservatives and liberals impact the political system in a variety of ways according to the report, from voting and donating more to maintaining greater levels of participation in politics overall.
It is likely the explosion in entertainment television and removal of apathetic moderate voters compounds this effect. With more and more moderate Americans simply not partaking in political discourse as a result of greater choice, polarized citizens make up a greater share of the debate and gain an even more disproportionate voice. And as television continues to develop and innovate, an even viler, more polarized political status quo may emerge. Thus, Dick Cheney and Fox are not really the problem behind political gridlock. In fact, it may be time to start blaming Game of Thrones.