Partisanship and Media

Michael Xenos

Recently there has been a fair amount of buzz surrounding White House comments about Fox News, including statements about whether it is a “real” news network and the extent to which administration officials would treat it as such.  The conflict has provided a veritable treasure trove of grist for pundits on the right and left, and it has also drawn a fair amount of interest from regular citizens interested in politics. An interesting sampling of the latter can be found in the comment feed associated with a recent New York Times article on the issue.

One of the benefits of a class such as the one you’re taking lies in its ability to put things like this in context.  Indeed, that’s one of the points of this blog as well.

If you were in a history class, you might be reminded of the various other presidents from earlier eras that have taken similarly aggressive stances toward the media, typically with poor results (e.g. Grant, McKinley, FDR, Nixon, see here for a discussion of this). In a political science course, however, perhaps the most important contextual information comes from research on the increasingly partisan nature of media consumption. In other words, comments from current administration officials may be similar to historical statements like Spiro Agnew’s famous quip about “nattering nabobs of negativism," but there is a new wrinkle in the sense that the current comments belong to a qualitatively different media environment with respect to news programming and political partisanship.

As Laura mentioned in a previous post, scholars have suggested that one of the byproducts of our new media environment is that people have much more control over what they watch, listen to, and read than they once did, and this has implications for how the media and politics are related.  Think about your parents or grandparents for example, and how they had to walk across the room to turn a heavy, clunky knob in order to change the channel on the television.  The walking was strenuous, but don’t feel too bad for them. They typically had only 3 or 4 channels to choose from. In contrast, today we have a practically unlimited variety of content to choose from at any hour of the day or night. The political implications of this are that many people now exercise a fair amount of filtering with respect to how and where they get political news – liberals can watch MSNBC and read the Daily Kos while conservatives can watch Fox and read Hot Air. (The two blogs mentioned here represent the most influential liberal and conservative blogs, respectively, as measured by political scientist David Karpf’s useful Blogosphere Authority Index.)  As far as cable television news goes, one is reminded of Stanford professor Shanto Iyengar’s research on partisan preferences for news content, which uses a clever experiment to demonstrate that there are clear differences in how liberals and conservatives react to identical headlines and news stories, based on which network they are attributed to.  (For the original paper, click here; for a more accessible write up in the Washington Post, click here.)  At the same time, researchers like Princeton’s Markus Prior suggest that an even bigger trend is for many people to exercise their newfound range of content choice to avoid political content altogether in favor of more entertaining programming.

So, it may be useful to think about some of these trends as you hear or perhaps even participate in more partisan discussions of these matters.  Do you see variation in the amount and kinds of political media consumed by you and your friends based on their levels of interest in politics and partisan leanings?  What implications does this have for how you think about the current flap between the White House and Fox News?

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