David Stack
Professor Lyn J. Freymiller, Ph.D.
CAS 137H
6 November 2012
Fragmentation and Polarization of News Media Audiences and the Political Implications
We are only thirty-five years removed from an era when just three television networks
dominated their market, collectively broadcasting to over ninety percent of the American primetime viewership (Veronis qtd. in Webster 366). Since that time, the proliferation of cable
television and the World Wide Web has presented consumers with a drastic increase in content
choice. These technological advancements have altered both the size and diversity of the typical
audience, developments referred to as audience fragmentation and polarization respectively.
Though the exact degree to which these have occurred remains contentious, these changes in
media consumption have extremely significant implications for the relationship between state
and citizen, a vital connection with a custodianship traditionally held by the news media. Based
on the literature on the subject, it is clear that both fragmentation and polarization have occurred
to some extent and that this paradigm shift has the potential to fundamentally alter the mechanics
of our republic by propagating inaccurate beliefs, furthering the ideological segregation of
American society, harshening the “culture wars,” destroying the common forum that the old
paradigm represented, and disrupting the main three political effects of that same regime, though
full realization of these implications appears unlikely (Gentzkow and Shapiro 2; Webster 366;
Blumler and Kavanagh 222).
The fragmentation of the average American television audience has been widely
observed and is relatively simple to show empirically. From 1985 to early 2003, the share of
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television viewing provided by the “big-three networks” dropped from 69.3% to 29%. During
the same period, the percent of television households that subscribed to multichannel providers
increased from 43% to 82%, and the average number of channels a television household had
access to increased from 14 to 101 (Webster 368). The rapid spread of Internet access has
increased consumer choice of news content in a similar way. Gentzkow and Shapiro’s data set of
national news websites included 1,379 entries (6). Of course, like television the average web user
regularly uses only a small fraction of the available content. Four news sites account for around
fifty percent of page views, and the top twenty sites account for close to eighty percent (18).
However, the “long-tail” of web audience distribution (a term that refers to the way the
considerable number of news sites that garner relatively small amounts of page views appear on
a bar graph) is even longer than that of TV. The introduction and proliferation of multichannel
television and the World Wide Web have had the undeniable effect of shrinking the typical news
audience. The more controversial question is the extent to which fragmentation has led to
ideological segregation and its associated political effects.
Audience polarization, a term that refers to the ideological self-segregation of mass
media consumers, is a development that merits significant analysis because of its expected
effects on our democratic system. Cass Sunstein articulates his (and many others’) fearful
prediction for the future:
Our communications market is rapidly moving [toward a situation where] people restrict
themselves to their own points of view—liberals watching and reading mostly or only
liberals; moderates, moderates; conservatives, conservatives; Neo-Nazis, Neo-Nazis…
[This limits the] unplanned, unanticipated encounters [that are] central to democracy
itself. (4, 8)
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But is Sunstein’s assertion accurate? If so, what are are its causes?
Though they squabble over the magnitude, it seems the consensus among the research
community is that audience polarization has occurred. Studies from as far back as 2004 confirm
evidence of that ongoing shift. That year, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press
found that the share of Fox News viewers who self-reported as conservative and the share of
CNN viewers who self-reported as liberal were both rapidly increasing. In that same paper, it
was reported that “the public’s evaluations of media credibility also are more divided along
ideological and partisan lines” (“News Audiences Increasingly Politicized” 1). Three years later,
Pew published results showing that different television programs had audiences with distinctly
different levels of political knowledge, a sign of educational (and thus, because of the dynamics
of the American political landscape, to a large part ideological) self-segregation. Programs
ranged from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, the two shows tied for first place with 54%
of the audience belonging to “the high knowledge group,” to network morning shows, with an
average of only 34 percent belonging to that same group (“What Americans Know: 1989-2007”
13). This segmentation is indicative of “vertical Balkanization,” a process where the
“communication patterns of elites and masses… increasingly diverge from each other,” as
envisioned by Elihu Katz as far back 1996 (qtd. in Blumler and Kavanagh 224). Perhaps the
most balanced and comprehensive effort to measure the extent of audience polarization came
from Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, as reported in their paper entitled “Ideological
Segregation Online and Offline.” As measured by the “isolation index,” which is calculated by
determining the difference in exposure to conservative media between self-reported liberals and
conservatives, Gentzkow and Shapiro found the following. Although news consumers with
extremely high or low conservative exposure were found to be rare, it was established that the
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Internet’s estimated isolation index of 7.5 was higher than that of “broadcast television (1.8),
magazines (2.9), cable television (3.3), and local newspapers (4.1)… [and] eliminating the
Internet would reduce the ideological segregation of news and opinion consumption across all
media from 4.9 to 3.8” (3). These results were qualified by reporting that new media
consumption patterns were still considerably less ideologically segregated than (in ascending
order of polarization) “actual networks formed through voluntary associations… work…
neighborhoods… or family” (4). Thus, Internet news is one of the most polarized media, but to
be presented in context it must be considered that is still considerably less segregated than the
extensive and growing residential ideological segregation present in the United States, a
phenomenon studied extensively by Bishop and Cushing in The Big Sort. Finally, although it’s
been shown that the magnitude of polarization has so far been relatively limited, it should be
noted that “the most extreme Internet sites are far more polarized than any source offline”
(Gentzkow and Shapiro 15). Regardless of the degree to which the American people choose to
consume it, the advent of the Internet has given them access to arguably the most polarized mass
distributors of news in the nation’s history.
Exactly what causes consumers to self-segregate is another question without a simple
answer. Generally speaking, theorists agree that the dominant force creating news bias is the
profit motive, which encourages firms to target their coverage to appeal to certain niches of the
populace (Bernhardt, Krasa, and Polborn 1092; Mullainathan and Shleifer 1031). This is known
as the demand-side explanation (to differentiate it from the weaker supply-side explanation).
However, there isn’t a consensus on a single force driving consumers to prefer news biases that
coincide with their own ideology. Many explanations do stem from conceptions of cognitive
consistency. Summarizing years of research into the subject, Mullainathan and Shleifer state:
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The idea that people appreciate, find credible, enjoy, and remember stories consistent
with their beliefs is standard in the communications literature… Research on memory
suggests that people tend to remember information consistent with their beliefs better
than that inconsistent with their beliefs… Research on information processing shows that
people find data inconsistent with their beliefs to be less credible and update less as a
result. (1032)
Cognitive dissonance theory, introduced by Leon Festinger in 1957, dictates that the “existence
of dissonance, being psychologically uncomfortable, will motivate a person to try to reduce
dissonance and achieve consonance… When dissonance is present… the person will actively
avoid situations and information that will increase the dissonance” (3). Cognitive dissonance is
defined as the situation arising from when two beliefs or bits of knowledge held by the same
person conflict with each other. Extensions of this theory include bias blind spot theory – which
holds that people are “deluded about their own biases,” that is they irrationally assume they don’t
exist – and the hostile media phenomenon, which is the observation that partisans from opposing
sides viewing the same broadcast will both tend to feel that the report was biased against them
(Stone 261). “In response to their perceptions of hostile bias in the mainstream media
environment, partisans of both sides have begun to explore alternative sources of news” (Iyengar
and Hahn 22).
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, what are this paradigm shift’s implications for our
political system? Research has indicated that for citizens to form “accurate beliefs… individuals
must encounter information which will sometimes contradict their pre-existing views”
(Gentzkow and Shapiro 2). One common fear articulated by many theorists is that news
audiences will splinter into “many small, relatively exclusive communities of interest that never
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encounter dissident voices or different points of view” (Webster 366). The homogeneity of these
“echo spheres” would amplify extreme points of view in accordance with the extensive research
of social psychologists (Bishop and Cushing 6). Katz and others also consider these
technological advancements as a threat to the symbolic common forum the old media provided,
especially as tool for social integration (qtd. in Webster 366). Whereas previously liberals and
conservatives consumed basically the same programming (even if they digested it differently),
polarization has slowly eliminated this common diet. This paradigm shift has been additionally
theorized as a disruption to the three main political effects of mass media: “agenda setting, the
spiral of silence, and the cultivation hypothesis” (Blumler and Kavanagh 222). Old media tended
to set a common political agenda for the nation. Now liberals can be extremely focused on one
issue, say healthcare reform, while conservatives are obsessed with another, say the war in
Afghanistan. This does not bode well for our deliberative democracy. Previously, those with
extreme views felt marginalized by mass media, discouraging them from action. Now every
extremist niche – be it Neo-Nazis, Communists, or Black Separatists – has a forum to not only
consume targeted media but discuss it with like-minded individuals. With respect to the
cultivation hypothesis, which views “mass media as a socializing agent” and declares that
television gradually changes viewers’ beliefs as they start to see the reality depicted on TV as
increasingly real, audience polarization is particularly troubling (Chandler). If conservatives and
liberals start to believe in fundamentally different realities, we may encounter an intractable
problem where debate centers on questions of conjecture and definition, thus making effective
policymaking nearly impossible.
To summarize, technological advancement has presented citizens with an unprecedented
array of options in consuming news content. This increase in choice has made the typical news
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audience smaller and less diverse ideologically. These changes have paradigm-shifting
implications for the way our elected leaders connect with and are held accountable to their
constituents.
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Works Cited
Bernhardt, D., S. Krasa, and M. Polborn. "Political Polarization and the Electoral Effects of
Media Bias." Journal of Public Economics 92.5-6 (2008): 1092-1104. Print.
Bishop, Bill, and Robert G. Cushing. The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America
Is Tearing Us Apart. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008. Print.
Blumler, Jay G. and Kavanagh, Dennis (1999): The Third Age of Political
Communication: Influences and Features, Political Communication, 16:3, 209-230
Chandler, Daniel. "Cultivation Theory." Cultivation Theory. Aberystwyth University, 18 Sept.
1995. Web. <http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/cultiv.html>.
Festinger, Leon. A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1962. Google
Books. Web. <http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=voeQ8CASacC&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&dq=a+theory+of+cognitive+dissonance&ots=9w83TxqgtC
&sig=Fq8wqfO0_u3oqpRV3TzXmg6kpfQ>.
Gentzkow, Matthew Aaron and Shapiro, Jesse M., Ideological Segregation Online and Offline
(April 13, 2010). Chicago Booth Initiative on Global Markets Working Paper No. 55.
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1588920
Iyengar, Shanto, and Kyu S. Hahn. "Red Media, Blue Media: Evidence of Ideological Selectivity
in Media Use." Journal of Communication 59.1 (2009): 19-39. Print.
Mullainathan, Sendhil, and Andrei Shleifer. “The Market for News”, American Economic
Review, Vol. 95, pp. 1031—1053, September 2005.
Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. News Audiences Increasingly Politicized.
Rep. Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 8 June 2004. Web.
<http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/215.pdf>.
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Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. What Americans Know: 1989-2007. Rep. Pew
Research Center for the People and the Press, 15 Apr. 2007. Web. <http://www.peoplepress.org/files/legacy-pdf/319.pdf>.
Stone, Daniel F. "Ideological Media Bias." Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 78.3
(2011): 256-271.
Sunstein, Cass R. Republic.com. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001. Print.
Webster, J. G. (2005). Beneath the Veneer of Fragmentation: Television Audience Polarization
in a Multi-Channel World. Journal of Communication. 55(2), 366-382. Reprinted in G.
Doyle (Ed.). (2007). Economics of the Mass Media. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.