This article was co-written by Sasha Barish and Katie Heintz.
Over the course of the 21st century, the percentage of Americans who identify as “patriotic” has been falling. This shift is largely generational, and also differs vastly along partisan, racial, and other demographic lines, an observation supported by other analyses in this article series. In making sense of those statistics, it’s important to acknowledge that “patriotism” is a word that means very different things to different people. This variation in meaning is both reflected in and driven by the media; and so, if different news sources use the term “patriotic” in different ways, someone’s source of information could be a meaningful factor in whether they identify with the label.
The Harvard Public Opinion Project’s recent poll of Americans aged 18-29 asked respondents whether they described themselves as “patriotic” and what media sources they regularly access for news and current events content. The answers reflect the gap in both patriotic identity and media preferences between progressives and conservatives. For instance, Fox News and MSNBC are known to provide conservative and progressive commentary, respectively, and to attract viewers of corresponding political persuasions. Since far more young Republicans identified as patriotic than the young Democrats did, it is not surprising that regular Fox News viewers were more likely to identify as patriotic than regular MSNBC viewers. According to the HPOP data, 76.3% of the Fox News viewers said they were patriotic, compared to 70.7% of the MSNBC viewers — and, among those who identified as patriotic, Fox News viewers were more likely to identify as “very patriotic.”
Despite this partisan breakdown, young people across the political spectrum who regularly watch any form of news media are significantly more likely to self-identify as “patriotic” than their peers. Only 61.8% of the total young people polled identified as “very patriotic” or “somewhat patriotic,” a full 10 percentage points less than the MSNBC viewers and 15 percentage points less than the Fox News viewers. Of the other media sources surveyed, people who regularly got news from CNN and from Facebook were somewhat more likely than average to identify as patriotic, with the figure standing at 66% for viewers of each source. Meanwhile, people who regularly got their news from Twitter or Instagram were about as likely as the average respondent to identify as patriotic. In short, with the exception of Facebook users’ high levels of patriotism, young people who watch the news on television tend to identify as patriotic more than those who read news on social media, though the two categories are not mutually exclusive.
Partisan differences in media consumption partially explain these differences, especially between specific social media platforms. In HPOP’s data, Republicans were more likely than Democrats to report getting news from Facebook, while Democrats were more likely to report getting news from Twitter and Instagram. Given that young Republicans were more likely to identify as “patriotic” than young Democrats, this gap in patriotism between media platforms may be attributed in part to party affiliation. Indeed, liberals are generally more likely to be politically active on social media than conservatives and moderates, while conservatives tend to find that Facebook in particular reflects their views. Those partisan differences, however, don’t tell the whole story. The correlation between identifying as patriotic and getting news from Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, or Facebook held true even when the data was divided up by political party: Democrats, Republicans, and independents were all more likely to describe themselves as patriotic if they accessed those media sources.
In other words, an individual’s choice of which partisan news source to watch is a less reliable predictor of patriotic sentiment than the choice to watch a partisan news channel in the first place. One likely explanation for this is that the young people who specifically seek out news from TV news sources may be more politically engaged and care more about national politics than those who consume news incidentally, mixed in with other content on social media feeds. According to Pew, only 38% of social media users use those sites to “like” or promote posts that are related to political or social issues. Meanwhile, the traditional cable-television channels of CNN, MSNBC and Fox News provide around the clock coverage of such issues, making it much more likely that viewers interact with political reporting and commentary. Coupled with research showing that political engagement and patriotism are strongly related, this may explain why those who utilize traditional media outlets report being more patriotic.
No matter what media sources Americans use, Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan argues that failing to follow any news at all is unpatriotic. While Americans may not think of watching the news as inherently patriotic, many of the activities people associate with patriotism — criticizing unpopular elected officials, performing community service, voting, and finding other ways to stay politically involved — require people to be informed to some degree. In an era when getting accurate news is increasingly difficult for Americans, it seems that people who identify strongly with the United States are more willing to put in the effort to stay informed.
While regular viewers of news across the political spectrum tend to be more patriotic, patriotism means different things to the consumers of different news sources. According to HPOP data, MSNBC and CNN viewers were more likely than average to consider Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders patriotic and less likely than average to consider Donald Trump patriotic. For Fox News, those trends were reversed. This is representative not only of a partisan distinction in definitions of patriotism, but also of a difference in how those specific media outlets talk about patriotism and American identity.
For example, over the course of the Trump presidency, MSNBC commentators have argued that Democrats should appeal more to patriotism, that Colin Kaepernick’s protest was more patriotic than Trump’s response to it, and that Trump is “the wrong president to claim the high ground on patriotism.” Despite these mentions by MSNBC, Fox News tends to be much more concerned with patriotism, even presenting an entire live award show called The Patriot Awards in 2019, at which the title of “Most Valuable Patriot” was awarded to amputee veteran marathon-runner and Virginia congressional candidate Rob Jones. Politically, Fox commentators have equated a lack of patriotism with socialism, and have said that Trump is “America first” while Sanders is “America last.”
Meanwhile, CNN, which leans left in its coverage, has youth viewers who report being less patriotic than viewers of the other TV news sources included in the poll. Some CNN commentators have argued that it is patriotic for people to question leaders and for leaders to resign when confronted with scandal. However, many of their Trump-era discussions of patriotism have been more ambivalent or analytical, saying that patriotism in the Trump era is increasingly popular with liberals, that the term means different things to different people, and that it seems more about politics than principles. What all of these case-studies reveal is the tendency of certain partisan news sources to disseminate ideological definitions of “patriotism” that reinforce their viewers’ political positions.
In short, young people’s choice of whether to describe themselves as “patriotic” is correlated to the media sources and platforms they frequent. It is clear that “patriotism” means different things in the discourse of different communities, and that media bubbles both shape and reflect those meanings. Recognizing this is a necessary component of understanding our own engagement with the nation’s political system and the relationship between terminology, news media, and political ideology.
Image source: Flickr/kun530