Politicized, or Offered a Choice?

That's a good question to pose to the folks at the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which yesterday released a large study on news consumers' attitudes toward their sources of information. The large survey contains much valuable information and includes most forms of news outlets -- local and national newspapers, news magazines, talk radio, cable news, network news, although it omits blogs or other less conventional sources.

The principal conclusion from Pew is that news audiences are more politicized than in previous years, with conservatives and liberals voting with their time and dollars to receive information from organs more likely to tilt their way politically. A somewhat different reading of the data would note that, in earlier years, conservatives had significantly fewer choices from which to gather their news. Fox and the Net, are new to the scene. It's true that talk radio has always been conservative (as I argued in this essay), but the rise in alternative media outlets allows conservatives to skip the undeniable partisanship displayed by the mainstream media.

That partisanship is on display in the categorization employed by Pew, which researched the readership of three "literary magazines": The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper's. At least two of these are reliably liberal (and the Atlantic post-Michael Kelley seems to be returning to form, alas), a fact that goes unmentioned by Pew. They do note that the networks failed to take advantage of the war-driven growth of audiences for news programs, but again fail to note the partisanship of those aging outlets.

The study purports to show that conservatives are less trustful of CNN and the networks than they once were, but this measurement is demonstrated in part by conservatives' preference for the new alternatives. Take away these alternatives, an act that would effectively dump conservatives and liberals back into the same audience, and the means Pew used for determining their distrust of the older news outlets fades.

I wasn't surprised by another finding that you'll hear about on talk radio within the hour: Rush Limbaugh's listeners follow hard news more closely than that of any other broadcast outlet on radio or TV. So much for the stereotype of his listeners as mind-numbed robots. (No other conservative radio hosts were included in the data.) Fully 56% of Rush's audience falls into this category, as compared with only 40% of NPR's listeners. Bo-Bos need educating, and now they have a choice. Spread the word.