8 ms·

Study links U.S. polarization to TV news deregulation

74 points by hliyan 11y ago

mrdrozdov 11y ago
Nate Silver has made similar observations about the previous two elections. Essentially, that you can choose which news that you want to see, and it may not be the reflective aggregate of reality. Although, I don't think he's ever tied this behavior to a particular event. It is interesting to think that news polarization has evolved over time, and hasn't always necessarily been the way that it is now.
jwm4 11y ago
In other words, it's all Drudge and Fox's fault. This "study" is utter nonsense.
- CamperBob2 11y ago
  Can you elaborate on why you feel its conclusion is necessarily bogus?
- liquidise 11y ago
  The study suggests that deregulation added more divisive programming. It then claims this ideologically pointed reporting is partially to blame for political polarization. If that is the case, the internet would only exacerbate the problem. So it sounds like you're spot on.
ClintEhrlich 11y ago
It's an interesting theory, but one of the confounding variables may be the emergence of the internet as a dominant news medium during the same period. The ability to choose your online sources of political information (e.g., Drudge Report vs. Huffington Post, etc.) would presumably trigger the same mechanism of action for polarization. It's also important to note that, even if it's true that deregulation originally contributed to polarization, that's not necessarily a strong argument for re-regulating these industries. Access to specialized content is an inevitable, technologically driven market trend, because people prefer experiences that are tailored to their tastes. In a sense, the polarization we see may have been lurking within us all along, masked by the limited choices available for expressing political or cultural preferences when choosing which media content to intellectually consume. Once we are able to act on those preferences, the previously subtle differences become self reinforcing.
justinjlynn 11y ago
Without restricting speech too much or engaging in substantial censorship perhaps it would be a good thing to start discussing what exactly differentiates news from entertainment and start saying who can call what what. Many countries do similar things with foods, in terms of defining exactly what, say, cheese is and must contain. Perhaps labelling laws for entertainment might be helpful in preventing people from consuming too much entertainment disguised as what most people would consider to be news. Of course, you can imagine how difficult it will be to implement but just because something is hard doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about it.
- ClintEhrlich 11y ago
  That sounds extremely counterproductive. At the point where you are letting the government mandate warning labels on political advocacy, you are by definition delegating authority for the absolute prohibition of that same speech, subject only to an exception when government-approved content requirements are complied with. Think about this as an algorithm: Try to imagine all of the security flaws that are jumping out at you. What if an actor trying to subvert the system chose to require content warnings that were significantly longer than the ensuing speech? What if the warnings mandated displaying horrific images or ear piercing noises? There are virtually infinite ways to abuse this authority and convert it into a veritable license to ban opposition speech. Allowing the government to ban certain speech right now is terrifying enough, but it's at least limited by fairly objective and reassuring judicial safeguards. What kinds of standards could possibly be durable enough to codify regarding which kinds of political speech can be required to bear which labels? What about what kinds of content the labels can be required to include? The permutations are endless; there's simply no practical way to prevent leaky abstraction. The system will eventually fail. When that's just normal hardware, it's a pain in the ass to fix. But when the substrate upon which you're operating is modern civilization, you probably won't even get the chance — your first mistake will be humanity's last.
  - justinjlynn 11y ago
    well, I am not saying that warning labels of that sort should be placed on speech. What I mean is that it is extremely difficult to know the biases. What I am attempting to articulate, perhaps not that well, is that a media outlet claiming to be 'fair and balanced' should have to articulate what that means and how it effects their reporting and how they frame their stories. News should mean just that, presenting advocacy as neutral information reporting is also counter-productive for the viewer.
bsder 11y ago
I'd probably attribute it more to the rise of cable TV, period. My family still didn't have cable in 1988. They got it sometime after that when I was no longer in the house. I would also say that the 2000 gerrymandering was the worst ever due to the fact that cheap compute power allowed the politicians to carve up the electorate very precisely. Safe and majority districts skyrocketed--which shifted the electoral fights to primaries--which moved the politicians further toward the edges.
- hga 11y ago
  Computerized gerrymandering is very likely a culprit here. As far as I know it started in earnest after the 1980 "Burton-mander" of California, which alerted everyone to its potential. Akin to the U.K. rotten and borough problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs
JesperRavn 11y ago
I think there is also a political dynamic in the US, where the inconsistencies in moderate politics have to be resolved one way or another, and people resolve them by choosing extreme views. By inconsistencies, I mean that anyone who is moderately left-wing with regard to Israel, will be called a crazy anti-semite (as Rand Paul is) unless they are to the far left on domestic politics. Similarly anyone who is on the moderate right on domestic politics is expected to be far right with regard to Israel and the Middle East. Anyone with moderate, consistent views would be called anti-Semitic by the right, and racist by the left.
willvarfar 11y ago
> The telecommunications act sought to open markets to competition, but the result was consolidation. Is it generally so that deregulation causes consolidation? And is this the opposite of what lawmakers were trying to achieve?
- liquidise 11y ago
  I would wager the trend is based on capital to enter market. If i want to start a restaurant or convenience store, i need real estate. Infrastructure businesses (cell, tv, internet, electricity, etc) require considerably more capital to enter or sustain. In many cases, we see this manifested in local monopolies for services like internet. In the case of television, deregulation has allowed big players to more easily buy up smaller shops, given the sheer cost of operation.
nether 11y ago
Internet news has always been unregulated. So people who mostly use online news are even more polarized? My far right wing coworker only reads Drudge Report and Real Clear Politics, and honestly the awful shit they cherrypick would make me hate the Dems too.
- comrh 11y ago
  Exactly, and with the amount of niche corners you can find an echo chamber that fits you perfectly.
- vectorpush 11y ago
  I've never known Real Clear Politics to be particularly partisan. edit: why do some have that impression?
robbrown451 11y ago
The big reason for polarization is a voting system that directly causes it. Single winner elections, where the candidate with the plurality of votes wins, will automatically cause polarization (see "Duverger's Law"). All the more so as candidates and their campaigns get more scientific about how to win. Because smart candidates will try to avoid having their vote split, plurality elections have two sweet spots, "middle right" and "middle left." Anywhere else is generally a no-man's land. Some things about TV and deregulation might contribute to it, but there are enough channels and enough other options for consuming news that I am not convinced that is a big part of the problem.
trynumber9 11y ago
I can't seem to access the full text. How did they control for the coincident rise in popularity of the web?
declan 11y ago
Let's say that political polarization is in fact increasing since 1996. But there's this little thing called the Internet that went mainstream that year -- and had a far bigger impact on yet another cable TV station (that was not even available in major markets in 1996). Also I can think of plenty of other causes that are equally or more plausible than the ones cited by the authors: * MSNBC launched in 1996. * 1996 presidential election, hotly contested because Democrats wanted to take back the House from the GOP (did not succeed) and Second Amendment advocates were alarmed because of 1993 and 1995 anti-gun legislation. There was the 1996 FBI white house files controversy, Clinton signing the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, etc. * Drudge Report launched in 1996 (followed by Lewinsky scandal in 1998). Though I think greater access to alternative media via the Internet, no matter what your political persuasion, is the most likely cause of greater polarization. You no longer had only ABC|NBC|CBS and your local newspaper and radio station. Republicans now had Drudge, Democrats had MSNBC.com, socialists had wsws.org, libertarians had Cato.org or Reason.com, etc.
- hugh4 11y ago
  Is US politics particularly polarised now, though? More polarised than 1968? More polarised than 1852? More polarised than 1983, when Reagan was President and all the left could talk about was how much they hated Reagan? (Not old enough to remember it, just going off the music and film from the period.)
  - hga 11y ago
    It is more polarized than 1983, which I am old enough to remember. E.g. Tip O'Neill, Speaker of the House through the end of 1986, was willing to work with Reagan. I came of political age in the '70s, watched Watergate unfold, can still remember where I was when we learned Nixon resigned; the Left's hatred of him was implacable, I've read that was true since around 1948-50. But things weren't quite so bad after he left the scene. We loathed Slick Willie with a passion (now, not so much...), but we could at times work with him. The 2000 election, though, that really polarized things, protesting the legitimacy of an election at the highest levels is utterly dangerous (one of the greatest things about our sorts of systems is solving the succession problem, one set of people running the nation replacing another), and Obama hasn't helped.
mkhpalm 11y ago
Something else that happened in 1996 is the internet was just getting started. With that came the dethroning of traditional information sources who then moved more towards sensationalism rather than news to keep viewers interested and advertising dollars flowing in.
jmadsen 11y ago
I have my own theory over the root of polarization in US politics: Newt Gingrich & the "Contact with America" Gingrich & GOP party thinkers (not the politicians themselves) were tired of losing the congress for so many years (and it was a very long period) and made a "war plan" to take it. This consisted of rallying the troops, and being ruthless with anyone who strayed. Up to that point, Dem & GOP were actually civil to one another. Gingrich made it known that his side of the aisle was not to talk to - I mean that literally - was not to talk to Dems or socialize, bargain, anything at all. The party would deal with that. No personal relationships would be tolerated. "You just don't get it". Remember that phrase? That was Gingrich's way of saying, "you believe what we say, or you aren't one of us". He made it clear there was no free-thinking, no wiggle room. This wasn't about good governance. This was about rallying the troops to win the Congress and White House. This was, IMHO, the start of the no negotiating, complete polarization period. This was taught not just to the GOP politicians, but to the party followers. There would be no more compromise; this was a war, with only one winner. This simply deteriorated into what we have today. The media did nothing other than pick up the blood scent and run with it; they never drove any of it, and none of it came from personal thoughts of the average American.
MaggieL 11y ago
"Study links TV news regulation to uniformity of political views, tovarich"
- hga 11y ago
  "There is no isvestia (news) in Pravda, and no pravda (truth) in Isvestia." (And what does it say that I can correctly spell those two Russian words? (Well, it says I'm a child of the Cold War.)) Seriously, between the set of regulations this paper is discussing, the "Fairness Doctrine" I've discussed elsewhere, the near uniformity of the big newspapers (aside from editorial page of The Wall Street Journal), and the same for the big national magazines (aside from US News and World Report and Reader's Digest), it's perhaps a surprise we didn't turn into a one party state.

74 points by hliyan 11y ago

Nate Silver has made similar observations about the previous two elections. Essentially, that you can choose which news that you want to see, and it may not be the reflective aggregate of reality. Although, I don't think he's ever tied this behavior to a particular event. It is interesting to think that news polarization has evolved over time, and hasn't always necessarily been the way that it is now.

jwm4 11y ago

In other words, it's all Drudge and Fox's fault. This "study" is utter nonsense.

CamperBob2 11y ago
Can you elaborate on why you feel its conclusion is necessarily bogus?
liquidise 11y ago
The study suggests that deregulation added more divisive programming. It then claims this ideologically pointed reporting is partially to blame for political polarization. If that is the case, the internet would only exacerbate the problem. So it sounds like you're spot on.

ClintEhrlich 11y ago

It's an interesting theory, but one of the confounding variables may be the emergence of the internet as a dominant news medium during the same period. The ability to choose your online sources of political information (e.g., Drudge Report vs. Huffington Post, etc.) would presumably trigger the same mechanism of action for polarization. It's also important to note that, even if it's true that deregulation originally contributed to polarization, that's not necessarily a strong argument for re-regulating these industries. Access to specialized content is an inevitable, technologically driven market trend, because people prefer experiences that are tailored to their tastes. In a sense, the polarization we see may have been lurking within us all along, masked by the limited choices available for expressing political or cultural preferences when choosing which media content to intellectually consume. Once we are able to act on those preferences, the previously subtle differences become self reinforcing.

justinjlynn 11y ago

Without restricting speech too much or engaging in substantial censorship perhaps it would be a good thing to start discussing what exactly differentiates news from entertainment and start saying who can call what what. Many countries do similar things with foods, in terms of defining exactly what, say, cheese is and must contain. Perhaps labelling laws for entertainment might be helpful in preventing people from consuming too much entertainment disguised as what most people would consider to be news. Of course, you can imagine how difficult it will be to implement but just because something is hard doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about it.

ClintEhrlich 11y ago
That sounds extremely counterproductive. At the point where you are letting the government mandate warning labels on political advocacy, you are by definition delegating authority for the absolute prohibition of that same speech, subject only to an exception when government-approved content requirements are complied with. Think about this as an algorithm: Try to imagine all of the security flaws that are jumping out at you. What if an actor trying to subvert the system chose to require content warnings that were significantly longer than the ensuing speech? What if the warnings mandated displaying horrific images or ear piercing noises? There are virtually infinite ways to abuse this authority and convert it into a veritable license to ban opposition speech. Allowing the government to ban certain speech right now is terrifying enough, but it's at least limited by fairly objective and reassuring judicial safeguards. What kinds of standards could possibly be durable enough to codify regarding which kinds of political speech can be required to bear which labels? What about what kinds of content the labels can be required to include? The permutations are endless; there's simply no practical way to prevent leaky abstraction. The system will eventually fail. When that's just normal hardware, it's a pain in the ass to fix. But when the substrate upon which you're operating is modern civilization, you probably won't even get the chance — your first mistake will be humanity's last.
- justinjlynn 11y ago
  well, I am not saying that warning labels of that sort should be placed on speech. What I mean is that it is extremely difficult to know the biases. What I am attempting to articulate, perhaps not that well, is that a media outlet claiming to be 'fair and balanced' should have to articulate what that means and how it effects their reporting and how they frame their stories. News should mean just that, presenting advocacy as neutral information reporting is also counter-productive for the viewer.

bsder 11y ago

I'd probably attribute it more to the rise of cable TV, period. My family still didn't have cable in 1988. They got it sometime after that when I was no longer in the house. I would also say that the 2000 gerrymandering was the worst ever due to the fact that cheap compute power allowed the politicians to carve up the electorate very precisely. Safe and majority districts skyrocketed--which shifted the electoral fights to primaries--which moved the politicians further toward the edges.

hga 11y ago
Computerized gerrymandering is very likely a culprit here. As far as I know it started in earnest after the 1980 "Burton-mander" of California, which alerted everyone to its potential. Akin to the U.K. rotten and borough problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs

JesperRavn 11y ago

I think there is also a political dynamic in the US, where the inconsistencies in moderate politics have to be resolved one way or another, and people resolve them by choosing extreme views. By inconsistencies, I mean that anyone who is moderately left-wing with regard to Israel, will be called a crazy anti-semite (as Rand Paul is) unless they are to the far left on domestic politics. Similarly anyone who is on the moderate right on domestic politics is expected to be far right with regard to Israel and the Middle East. Anyone with moderate, consistent views would be called anti-Semitic by the right, and racist by the left.

willvarfar 11y ago

> The telecommunications act sought to open markets to competition, but the result was consolidation. Is it generally so that deregulation causes consolidation? And is this the opposite of what lawmakers were trying to achieve?

liquidise 11y ago
I would wager the trend is based on capital to enter market. If i want to start a restaurant or convenience store, i need real estate. Infrastructure businesses (cell, tv, internet, electricity, etc) require considerably more capital to enter or sustain. In many cases, we see this manifested in local monopolies for services like internet. In the case of television, deregulation has allowed big players to more easily buy up smaller shops, given the sheer cost of operation.

nether 11y ago

Internet news has always been unregulated. So people who mostly use online news are even more polarized? My far right wing coworker only reads Drudge Report and Real Clear Politics, and honestly the awful shit they cherrypick would make me hate the Dems too.

comrh 11y ago
Exactly, and with the amount of niche corners you can find an echo chamber that fits you perfectly.
vectorpush 11y ago
I've never known Real Clear Politics to be particularly partisan. edit: why do some have that impression?

robbrown451 11y ago

The big reason for polarization is a voting system that directly causes it. Single winner elections, where the candidate with the plurality of votes wins, will automatically cause polarization (see "Duverger's Law"). All the more so as candidates and their campaigns get more scientific about how to win. Because smart candidates will try to avoid having their vote split, plurality elections have two sweet spots, "middle right" and "middle left." Anywhere else is generally a no-man's land. Some things about TV and deregulation might contribute to it, but there are enough channels and enough other options for consuming news that I am not convinced that is a big part of the problem.

trynumber9 11y ago

I can't seem to access the full text. How did they control for the coincident rise in popularity of the web?

declan 11y ago

Let's say that political polarization is in fact increasing since 1996. But there's this little thing called the Internet that went mainstream that year -- and had a far bigger impact on yet another cable TV station (that was not even available in major markets in 1996). Also I can think of plenty of other causes that are equally or more plausible than the ones cited by the authors: * MSNBC launched in 1996. * 1996 presidential election, hotly contested because Democrats wanted to take back the House from the GOP (did not succeed) and Second Amendment advocates were alarmed because of 1993 and 1995 anti-gun legislation. There was the 1996 FBI white house files controversy, Clinton signing the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, etc. * Drudge Report launched in 1996 (followed by Lewinsky scandal in 1998). Though I think greater access to alternative media via the Internet, no matter what your political persuasion, is the most likely cause of greater polarization. You no longer had only ABC|NBC|CBS and your local newspaper and radio station. Republicans now had Drudge, Democrats had MSNBC.com, socialists had wsws.org, libertarians had Cato.org or Reason.com, etc.

hugh4 11y ago
Is US politics particularly polarised now, though? More polarised than 1968? More polarised than 1852? More polarised than 1983, when Reagan was President and all the left could talk about was how much they hated Reagan? (Not old enough to remember it, just going off the music and film from the period.)
- hga 11y ago
  It is more polarized than 1983, which I am old enough to remember. E.g. Tip O'Neill, Speaker of the House through the end of 1986, was willing to work with Reagan. I came of political age in the '70s, watched Watergate unfold, can still remember where I was when we learned Nixon resigned; the Left's hatred of him was implacable, I've read that was true since around 1948-50. But things weren't quite so bad after he left the scene. We loathed Slick Willie with a passion (now, not so much...), but we could at times work with him. The 2000 election, though, that really polarized things, protesting the legitimacy of an election at the highest levels is utterly dangerous (one of the greatest things about our sorts of systems is solving the succession problem, one set of people running the nation replacing another), and Obama hasn't helped.

mkhpalm 11y ago

Something else that happened in 1996 is the internet was just getting started. With that came the dethroning of traditional information sources who then moved more towards sensationalism rather than news to keep viewers interested and advertising dollars flowing in.

jmadsen 11y ago

I have my own theory over the root of polarization in US politics: Newt Gingrich & the "Contact with America" Gingrich & GOP party thinkers (not the politicians themselves) were tired of losing the congress for so many years (and it was a very long period) and made a "war plan" to take it. This consisted of rallying the troops, and being ruthless with anyone who strayed. Up to that point, Dem & GOP were actually civil to one another. Gingrich made it known that his side of the aisle was not to talk to - I mean that literally - was not to talk to Dems or socialize, bargain, anything at all. The party would deal with that. No personal relationships would be tolerated. "You just don't get it". Remember that phrase? That was Gingrich's way of saying, "you believe what we say, or you aren't one of us". He made it clear there was no free-thinking, no wiggle room. This wasn't about good governance. This was about rallying the troops to win the Congress and White House. This was, IMHO, the start of the no negotiating, complete polarization period. This was taught not just to the GOP politicians, but to the party followers. There would be no more compromise; this was a war, with only one winner. This simply deteriorated into what we have today. The media did nothing other than pick up the blood scent and run with it; they never drove any of it, and none of it came from personal thoughts of the average American.

MaggieL 11y ago

"Study links TV news regulation to uniformity of political views, tovarich"

hga 11y ago
"There is no isvestia (news) in Pravda, and no pravda (truth) in Isvestia." (And what does it say that I can correctly spell those two Russian words? (Well, it says I'm a child of the Cold War.)) Seriously, between the set of regulations this paper is discussing, the "Fairness Doctrine" I've discussed elsewhere, the near uniformity of the big newspapers (aside from editorial page of The Wall Street Journal), and the same for the big national magazines (aside from US News and World Report and Reader's Digest), it's perhaps a surprise we didn't turn into a one party state.