Update: The New York Post is reporting that Nancy Genovese, Glenn Beck fan, FEMA camp conspiracy theorist, and tea bagger, was casing out a Long Island National Guard base. She had in her car the arsenal pictured to the right. Of course there will always be the unhinged and the mentally ill who listen to the crazy conspiracies promulgated by the Lou Dobbs and Glenn Becks of the world. But now the non-print conspiracy media has convinced the majority. In a recent Research 2000 poll, three fourths of Southern whites doubt the President was born in Hawaii.
There is a perennial argument about whether the media is biased in a liberal or conservative way. To be sure more liberals read the New York Times and more conservatives watch Fox News. The presumption it is that the ideology of the media which is in play and that is what drives the “bias”. Interesting new research puts that in question, namely it is the kind of media which drives the ideology. It doesn’t matter whether the newspaper is conservative or liberal, but rather reading print media itself leads to greater liberalism. The following was in today’s issue of the journal Science:
A common belief in the United States is that the media exhibit a liberal bias, which generally aligns them with Democratic programs and politicians, in their reporting of the news and in their selection of what news to report on. In fact, one study estimates the effect of Fox News Channel, which was launched about a decade ago and is generally more conservative than other television outlets, as having increased the Republican share of the vote by half a percentage point.
One month before the November 2005 gubernatorial election in Virginia, Gerber et al. carried out a randomized field study in which several thousand households that did not already receive a daily newspaper were given trial subscriptions to either the Washington Post (liberal) or the Washington Times (conservative). Post-election telephone interviews established that receiving either newspaper had little impact on factual knowledge (such as Harriet Miers being a Supreme Court nominee) or political attitudes (such as President Bush’s approval rating). What was affected was voter turnout (as measured by administrative records) and, surprisingly, actual voter choice, with both sets of newspaper-receiving households favoring the Democratic candidate by about seven percentage points.
Am. Econ. J. Appl. Econ. 1, 35 (2009).
Evangelical social critic Neil Postman in his 1986 classic, Amusing Ourselves to Death , noted that the replacement of the print media with television had a very negative effect on our ability to think. A reader must follow a line of thought and make inferences. The reader compares and contrast assertions. To achieve success in the print world is the ability to follow logical and coherent ideas.
Television with its quick cuts first made popular by MTV is much more ephemeral. You see an earthquake on the news followed by a story about a cute kitten. We become a “peek a boo” world where we lose the ability to think “seriously, rationally and coherently.” Postman also draws on his religious heritage and notes the prohibitions against images in the Second Commandment (Protestant ordering) over and against the “Word”.
Which leads us to the study referenced above. One of the more confusing things about conservatives today is why stories that have no basis in reality — such as the birther conspiracy theory and global warming denialism – have such “legs” with conservatives. I contend it’s the kind of media that is more popular with conservatives. Conservative print media does not convince while conservative television does.
When this group blog got started the founder of the TCOT report asked us whether we would be doing any investigative journalism because there was a paucity of it on his site (which being modelled after Drudge consisted mostly of hyperlinks). We have done that and at least one of us has come from a print journalism background. What the print paradigm does to you is the necessity of checking the references rather than relying on arguments from authority. In fact, that is what a college education does also. Like the effect noted above, the greater the education level a voter had resulted in a greater level of support for Obama in the previous cycle.
It used to be with conservatives such as the late William F. Buckley that conseratives also could think coherently because it was the National Review and not Fox News that was driving conservatism. Since there no longer exists a conservative intellectual tradition it stands to reason that college educated and literate people who consume print media are going to be more liberal. The Buckley example is instructive in that it shows that conservatism is not per se anti-intellectual. But given the Pol Pot style purge of intellectuals from conservatism by the fans of Rush and Fox News I don’t see a conservative intellectual renaissance any time soon.
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