In 2009, when Dick Cheney left office with a robust approval rating of 13 percent, it seemed nothing united Americans more than a good joke at his expense. Association with the outgoing vice president meant political suicide, a fate John McCain desperately tried to avoid when his campaign politely requested that Cheney skip the 2008 Republican National 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 all Americans are like 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. In reality, increased choice may increase partisanship not through the explosion of partisan media and the acceptance of partisan thinking, but rather through the growth of apolitical programming like ESPN and HBO. By giving viewers alternatives to traditional evening news sources, such programming has 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 is based on the premise that people naturally like to have their beliefs reinforced. Thus, when given a wide swath of news outlets to choose from, most people prefer the more partisan narrative that more closely resembles their views. In an interview with the HPR, Nicholas DiFonzo, a professor of psychology at the Rochester Institute of Technology, 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 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.
However, recent research casts doubt on the extent to which people are really visiting these partisan news sites and locking themselves in self-reinforcing echo chambers. In an interview with the HPR, R. Kelly Garret, an assistant professor at Ohio State’s School of Communication, 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 toward traditional media appears to apply to both the Internet and television. According to research by Sharad Goel, an assistant professor in Stanford’s Management Science & Engineering Department, polarizing articles from social media and web searches only account for 2 percent of total news consumption. Meanwhile, 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 … online.” That level, at best, is pretty minimal.
As such, while the ideological spectrum of news media has widened in recent years, most Americans remain near the middle. As Markus Prior, a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton, 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 30 percent had ventured as far as the New York Times. Meanwhile, 30 percent of visitors to the New York Times’ website identify as conservative; similarly, around a fourth of Dailykos.com readers also read Foxnews.com. As Garrett explained, “People have a preference for seeing their views reinforced, without having an aversion to encountering the other side.” In other words, the walls of the echo chamber may not be so impenetrable 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. Even those who lacked a specific interest in politics would stay in touch with the news and gather knowledge about politics via these traditional news broadcasts. As a result, they were more likely to vote and participate politically.
With the growth in choice between so many apolitical, entertainment-oriented 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,” 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. For example, Professor Matthew Gentzkow of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business has found that up to half of the aggregate decline in voter turnout since the 1950s can be explained by increased television choice. As Prior summarized, “If you take [nonpartisan] people out of the news audience who would otherwise would have watched [the news] without caring too much about it … 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 diminishing engagement among the politically moderate or apathetic.
The Polarized Are Speaking Up
Unsurprisingly, the polarized disproportionately dominate the political debate. A series of Pew reports on polarization found that “those at both the left and right ends of the spectrum, who together comprise about 20 percent of the public overall, have a greater impact on the political process than do those with more mixed ideological views.” Specifically, roughly 40 percent of ideologically consistent conservatives and 30 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 this way only 12 percent of the time. According to the report, 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.
The explosion in entertainment television and the removal of apathetic moderate voters likely 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 more polarized political status quo may emerge. Thus, Dick Cheney and Fox are not really the problem behind political gridlock. Rather, it may be time to start blaming “Game of Thrones.”