Polarized News Junkies

I have argued (here and previous) that mainstream media control the national agenda. The intensity of their effort to retain control suggests to me a fear that control is slipping away, a fear given indirect support by Markus Prior’s recent book on Post-Broadcast Democracy: How Media Choice Increases Inequality in Political Involvement and Polarizes Elections. The author first describes a golden age of television news, when TV “consisted essentially of three networks, and many people watched news. At the height of the broadcast era, from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, almost half of all Americans watched one of the three network newscasts at 6:30 p.m. on a regular weekday evening.” Prior calls people of that era “politically informed, at least on some basic level.” During that time, network television helped end the Vietnam war, remove Nixon from the White House, and bring down Carter as well.

In his look at the same period, James Q. Wilson found that while the mainstream media changed middle class American views on Vietnam, their impact on working- class people proved less significant, a finding Wilson attributed to the media’s realizing they were serving a mass audience, and restraining their overt bias in order to hold that audience. Wilson believes today’s niche-marketed media, no longer with a mass audience, more freely express their true views.

As for Prior, he writes that the population currently watching network news is below 10%, and identifies 20% of the TV audience as happy enough with cable and other news to make news their preferred viewing choice. He’s worried about the lack of political participation of the other 80%—those who get their news from Leno, Letterman, or nowhere. People who follow the news re-enforce their partisan views with their preferred niche choices. They help make politics confrontational. The less partisan uninvolved, by voting in reduced numbers, deny America the benefit of their more moderate, middle-of-the-road sentiments.