In the last three presidential elections, Americans have gotten used to staring at electoral maps that seem to describe a radically divided country. You have the "blue" or Democratic East and West coasts – together with many of the older industrial states of the Northern Midwest. While the Red or Republicans states are comprised of the deep south, the conservative “Bible Belt” states of the center’s center: Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma as well as most of the states of the Western U.S. such as Utah, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. The "blue" states had long traditions of progressive politics and active government whichlook and act more like European social democracies – with higher taxes, more generous social programs, and higher levels of education. The "red" states there was deep distrust of centralized government, lower taxes, looser gun laws, and "right to work" laws that made it virtually impossible for workers to unionize, leading often to lower unemployment levels and lower wages.
In reality, as many political scientists point out, the "blue state," "red state" divide is an oversimplification. It is as much an urban-rural divide as a regional one: there are blue patches in red states – cities like Austin, Texas and Charlotte, North Carolina where people think and talk and vote much like people in Boston, Los Angles or New York, while there solidly republican areas in upstate New York, Northern Michigan or rural Oregon, even those states reliably vote for Democrats. "We live in two Americas," the conservative commentator Michael Barone, wrote during the last presidential election. Barone argued that the America of the 1950’s was "cultural cohesive," knit together by a radically different media environment.
'That was an America of universal media, in which everyone watched one of three similar TV channels and newscasts every night. Radio, 1930s and 1940s movies, and 1950s and early 1960s television painted a reasonably true picture of what was typically American." Now, Americans live in entirely separate information and media environments. "One America listens to Rush Limbaugh; the other to NPR. Each America has its favorite cable news channel. As for entertainment, Americans have 100-plus cable channels to choose from, and the Internet provides many more options."
The impression of radical polarization is not merely an impression. It has been confirmed in numerous studies. The two major political parties – Democrats and Republicans – are more ideologically consistent than in the past. There were once more conservative democrats and liberal Republicans. Major legislation up until the 1970's and 1980's often enjoyed widespread bi-partisan support. In the last twenty years, it has been almost impossible to get one party to support laws proposed by the other. The Republican Party in particularly has hounded "disloyal" moderates from its ranks and almost never supports a bill that is generated by Democrats. One of the most interesting findings of political scientist Robert Shapiro of Columbia University is the fact that voters no longer respond to information in the same way. Shapiro shows that while Democrats and Republicans have always supported different causes, they interpreted information in similar ways. For example, when the Vietnam War went badly during the mid to late 1960's, support for President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, went down by equal proportions among Democratic as well as Republican voters. It started higher among Democratic supporters but dropped in much the same way as those voters were forced to conclude that one of Johnson's key policies was failing. Similarly, support for Republican President Richard Nixon fell steadily among both Republicans and Democrats during the Watergate scandal. Thus while Republicans and Democrats had different sympathies – they both responded to bad news in similar ways, forced to admit, however reluctantly, that – objectively speaking -- things were going badly for their president. By contrast, support among Republican voters remained rock solid during the eight years of George Bush despite a bloody and expensive war in Iraq and the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. Bush supporters were not moved at all by what appeared to be “objectively” bad news. Studies consistently showed that Bush supporters continued to believe things that were by most standards "objectively" incorrect: that Saddam Hussein was involved in the planning and execution of the September 11 attacks on the United States; that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq (despite admissions by the Bush administration itself that they had not); and that the great majority of other countries around the world supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
This sense of "objectively" appears to have disappeared in recent years, as FarodManjoo argues in his book, "True Enough." One of the keys to these apparent misperception is the different media that Americans watch, read and listen to. A disproportionate number of those who shared these "misperceptions" about Iraq were watchers of Fox News, the national cable news channel of Rupert Murdoch, which was an unwavering supporter of the Bush administration, the invasion of Iraq and helped to blur the lines between fact and opinion in ways that were quite new in American television news.
Manjoo argues that profound changes in the structure of American media have made it easier for people to construct separate, alternative versions of reality that do not intersect with one another. Between the 1940’ and the 1970's and 1980's, the American media landscape was dominated by three national television stations, each producing its own nightly news broadcast program. With each network competing for the largest possible audience share, the news broadcasts were centrist, careful not to appear to strongly partisan for fear of alienating part of the public. The aim of these generalist networks was to appeal to all potential viewers – alienating either Democratic or Republican voters would be bad business. Things began to change with the cable television revolution of the 1970's and 1980's. With the sudden proliferation of dozens, then hundreds of channels, the business model was no longer to try to win 100 percent of the audience but to capture a solid niche. Achieving a five percent or ten percent market share would be highly profitable. In the early 1980’s, President Ronald Reagan decided to get rid of the traditional standards that had guided television media: the "fairness doctrine," and the "equal time" doctrine, which were designed to prevent commercial TV news from engaging in political advocacy without adequately representing the other side. Reagan’s appointees at the Federal Communications felt that the cable TV world, diversity of views would be guaranteed by the large number of channels and no longer needed to be observed within a single channel. As a result, news programs were developed that were much more partisan designed to appeal to a niche audience. And to keep viewers from changing the channel, news programs became more emotional: hosts screamed at their guests, engaged in verbal jousts, made passionate appeals to their viewers. Fox News became the model of the new formula.
The creation of the Internet enhanced the "Balkanization" of American media. People increasingly seek out news websites that confirm their existing opinions and rarely look at sites that challenge their pre-existing opinions. While traditional generalist media had careful standards of proof before they printed or broadcast a story, on the Internet anything goes: you can find websites that “prove” that George Bush (or the Israeli secret services) were behind the September 11 attacks or that President Barack Obama is a Muslim (a belief held by roughly half of Republican voters). Studies, which Manjoo cites, have found that when people group together with people who agree with them, their opinions become sharper and more extreme, whereas when they must confront people who think different, they are careful to express themselves much more moderate. And so on a liberal web site critical of the Iraq war, one moves quickly from the war is wrong, to George Bush is an idiot and a fascist. As Manjoo points out the tendency to look for confirmation of one's own beliefs and dismiss contrary evidence is part of human nature – and was well-documented before the Internet age – (sports fans of one team are much more likely to “see” fouls committed by the other team and object when referees call fouls on their own team). But newer media technology offers great support to this deep-seated aspect of human nature.
Although Manjoo does not offer solutions to the current polarization, it is worth noting that countries in which media are almost entirely unregulated and private – the United States and Italy come to mind – suffer from greater polarization. Whereas countries in which television is still dominated by state-owned broadcasting companies with traditional standards of proof and fairness – the U.K. and Germany – suffer less from the “true enough” problem.
True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, FarhadManjoo, pp. 256