A Major New Study Shows That Political Polarization Is Mainly A Right-Wing Phenomenon [View all]

[JHan]

Last edited Fri Mar 17, 2017, 01:01 AM - Edit history (1)

A major new study of social-media sharing patterns shows that political polarization is more common among conservatives than liberals — and that the exaggerations and falsehoods emanating from right-wing media outlets such as Breitbart News have infected mainstream discourse.

Though the report, published by the Columbia Journalism Review, does an excellent job of laying out the challenge posed by Breitbart and its ilk, it is less than clear on how to counter it. Successfully standing up for truthful reporting in this environment “could usher in a new golden age for the Fourth Estate,” the authors write. But members of the public who care about such journalism are already flocking to news organizations like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and, locally, The Boston Globe, all of which have experienced a surge in paid subscriptions since the election of President Trump. That’s heartening, but there are no signs that it’s had any effect on the popularity or influence of the right-wing partisan media.

*snip*

The CJR study, by scholars at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, at Harvard Law School, and the MIT Center for Civic Media, examined more than 1.25 million articles between April 1, 2015, and Election Day. What they found was that Hillary Clinton supporters shared stories from across a relatively broad political spectrum, including center-right sources such as The Wall Street Journal, mainstream news organizations like the Times and the Post, and partisan liberal sites like The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast.

By contrast, Donald Trump supporters clustered around Breitbart — headed until recently by Stephen Bannon, the hard-right nationalist now ensconced in the White House — and a few like-minded websites such as The Daily Caller, Alex Jones' Infowars, and The Gateway Pundit. Even Fox News was dropped from the favored circle back when it was attacking Trump during the primaries, and only re-entered the fold once it had made its peace with the future president.

http://news.wgbh.org/2017/03/15/politics-government/major-new-study-shows-political-polarization-mainly-right-wing

A LOT of food for thought.

EDIT:

What this suggests is that whichever party is more unified wins the prize.. seems simple enough right? Yes, democrats have to create better memes to challenge the conservative spin machine, but this problem goes beyond the presence of a sound dem strategy ( or not).

We've got a serious fact problem in America where people don't expend the time or effort to ascertain if something is factual or not. The information age has made it easy to retreat to sources that feed our biases and prejudices, where folks live in a perpetual bubble of ignorance.

Facts are now construed as "matters of opinion" - Facts like : Global warming is real, racism and sexism continue to harm social progress, vaccines ARE effective,trickle down economics is BS, etc. RWingers are especially guilty of repudiating FACTS because they despise all the great things about modern living: cosmopolitanism, social liberalization, gender equality, fighting racial injustice, renewable energy, diversity etc.