News networks give more airtime to Congress members with extreme views than to others
The media's role in pushing white grievance, and how to move foward
I started writing today’s newsletter about President Trump, but after about 600 words, I deleted it. It’s time to move on.
But as Lyz Lenz writes, we can’t move on. Trump, and what he represents, is not over.
White grievance is one of the few renewable natural resources that Americans are willing to invest in. And why not? It’s good business. Fox News has made an empire of it. Look at all the journalists who have made a lot of money writing books about Donald Trump. Think about all the people who have made money writing about their time in the White House.
We are a country and an economy built on white grievance.
And as a distribution mechanism of white grievance, mass media’s role in shaping our collective consciousness has to go under a reformation.
In a study published in The Journal of Communication, researchers found that cable news networks and network news programs give more airtime to members of Congress who have the most extreme views. This has been an ongoing challenge at news organizations for years, the researchers noted.
The result: media gate-keeping and agenda setting play a role in America’s polarization.
“There were more televised statements by extreme members and fewer statements by moderate members across all networks and network types,” the researchers wrote.
While Facebook, Google and Twitter have entered the spotlight, pushing Americans towards one end of the political spectrum or the other, it would be foolish to ignore the power of television.
Talking to Journalist’s Resource, one of the study’s authors said
“The Congress that gets reported in the media is a different ideological distribution than Congress as it exists,” one of the study’s authors, Joshua P. Darr, an assistant professor of political communication at Louisiana State University, tells Journalist’s Resource. “The media feature these extreme legislators and that makes Congress seem more extreme than it is.”
Darr and colleagues looked at more than 46,000 transcripts of national TV news programs between January 3, 2005 and January 3, 2013, focusing on what members of the House of Representatives said on these programs.
And since 2013, it’s only gotten worse.
Journalist’s Resource reports:
Darr says the most partisan lawmakers likely have sought and been given even more airtime in recent years, especially since Trump took office.
Republican legislators soon discovered that appearing on TV news programs was an easy way to communicate directly with the president, known to watch national news broadcasts and Fox News in particular, Darr explains.
“Media coverage on partisan networks, if anything, has gotten more important for members of Congress,” Darr says.
The researchers point out in their paper that both Fox News, which leans right, and CNN, which tends to lean left, gave more airtime to Republicans with extreme views than Democrats with extreme views. They also write that left-leaning MSNBC “seems to have prioritized content from the most conservative members of the House … possibly in an effort to present negative exemplars to liberal audiences for criticism.”
As we’ve discussed, who news programs bring on to air their viewpoints determines how people view the world. But it’s a multiple part equation: the messenger matters as much as the message, as does the medium.
With a new administration and new Congress, the news media needs to reconsider its role as propagating white grievance.
Stop giving airtime and column inches to politicians making bad-faith arguments. Not everything is comparable.
Stop relying on tired tropes of voters in diners as you search for ‘the real America.’ This is divisive, implying that one area of the nation is the true America.
Stop putting former politicians who have done incredible amounts of harm on air as talking heads. This is a tough one, I know, as who else are you going to put on air? I sit here watching ABC News’ coverage of the Inauguration and to have Chris Christie and Rahm Emanuel on is disgraceful.
And as we’ve talked about many times, please change the narrative of political coverage from a left/right construction and the horse-race frame, and instead focus on finding the closest thing to truth. This is how you can do your part in blunting the spread of the worst ideas.
Trump and Trumpism should be tossed into the trash bin of history. But that would ignore that Trump and Trumpism are America.
After the siege on The Capitol, Michele Norris, a columnist at The Washington Post wrote:
I can tell you with great confidence that a large percentage of Black Americans were shocked but not surprised by Wednesday’s events. Black people, and perhaps most people of color in this country, are conditioned to take mobs of White men at their word when they make repeated threats. We have our long history of racialized terror to thank for that instinct.
Others ignored or played down the warnings that have been sounding all year. When those crowds stormed the statehouse in Michigan, when groups wearing camouflage and toting long guns began holding demonstrations around the country, when the president mounted a campaign of misinformation to convince his followers that he was robbed of an election — we should have known it would end this way. It could have been worse, and still can be.
So now, we must face this question: Is our country far too tolerant of the menacing behavior of too many White men? There is a whole “boys will be boys” vernacular that bevels the hard edges of this rebellion, in part, because America has always mythologized the tough guy willing to stick it to the man.
As the tragedy unfolded on Wednesday, the people originally labeled as protesters and rowdies were finally given their proper names: rioters and insurrectionists. They left on their own, some pumping fists, some vowing to return with weapons, some carrying stolen items hoisted like trophies. By nightfall, there were reportedly only 52 arrests.
As Lenz and Norris point out, white grievance is American history. The media, with its outsize role in shaping our society, has the power to push America forward. Its choices on who it gives the microphone to can change our perceptions of what we know, as well as what we think.
Thank you for allowing me into your inbox, today and every day. If you have tips, or thoughts on the newsletter, please drop me a line. Or you can follow me on Twitter. If you arrived here via social media or a colleague, please consider signing up.
Simon & Garfunkel, “America”
Some interesting links:
For how to game Wall Street:
How Chaotic Redditors Made GameStop Stock Skyrocket (and Made Short Sellers Cry) (Vice)
For platforms:
Facebook Said It Would Stop Pushing Users to Join Partisan Political Groups. It Didn’t. (The Markup)
Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Drivers License’ Hit No. 1 in a Week. Here’s How. (NYT)
For publishers:
Inside Nancy Dubuc’s Quest to Rehabilitate Vice (The Information)
Andreessen Horowitz Looks to Launch Opinion Publication as Its Media Ambition Grows (The Information)
For the Fox reckoning:
Fox News Lays Off Digital Employees Amid Reorganization (Variety)
Shep Smith breaks his silence about why he left Fox News (CNN)
For CMOs:
CMOs falling back on ‘low risk, low return’ strategies (The Drum)
For earnings:
P&G Q2 results (P&G)