Mr. Limbaugh if you're nasty: How right-wing mean media keeps conservatives on the fringe - Salon.com - 0 views
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modern incivility is, in many ways, a new ball game.
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Even at our most divisive historical junctures, the acrimonious debates and accusations that emerged had few venues beyond the mainstream press.
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Research suggests that political commentary is increasingly replacing conventional news and much of this commentary is outrage-based.
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The rate of increase in the number of outrage venues is evident in radio where there are 3,795 all-talk or all-news stations in the United States
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more than triple the number in existence just 15 years ago
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proliferation of blogs in terms of the number of new platforms for outrage content.
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the Project for Excellence in Journalism
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Talk radio is the second most popular radio format in the nation, falling only slightly behind the number one format: country music.
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radio research firm Arbitron
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Although liberal hosts attract a far smaller audience (a difference explained in part by liberals’ greater trust in traditional journalism)
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As a point of comparison, the offerings on Fox and MSNBC are both routinely rated higher than their more moderate competition on CNN.
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The aggregate audience for outrage media is immense.
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Our estimate for talk radio, using Arbitron data for the top 12 hosts and extrapolating to the larger talk radio world, roughly 35 million listeners daily.
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nightly outrage programs on cable attract close to 10 million viewers
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Quantcast
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the 20 top political blogs and, again, extrapolating to the broader blogosphere, we estimate 2 million people log on to at least one outrage-based political blog on a daily basis.
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The audience is composed largely of those who are most likely to vote, most likely to donate to political causes, and most likely to be politically active in many other ways.
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the Drudge Report that curate thematic news stories and blog posts
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In moments past when things got ugly— the partisan press of the early 1800s comes to mind—publication and circulation was much slower. The rate of diffusion has increased over time, but accelerated exponentially in the last 30 years.
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metastasized
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The Bush White House, hardly an inept political operation, was outmatched.
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For example, in its initial story on revelations that GOP presidential aspirant Herman Cain had been accused of sexual harassment, the Washington Post addressed the question of conservatives’ reaction to the controversy.
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When these changes combine they gather force. There is synergy in the complementary incentives shared by outrage commentators, party leaders, candidates, and interest group activists.
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The scholarly literature on political polarization in the United States does not align with the growth of outrage commentary.
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Political scientist Morris Fiorina concludes that in terms of its ideological composition “the American public looks much the same as it did a half century ago—centrist more than polarized in its specific positions, pragmatic more than ideological in its general orientation.”
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Alan Abramowitz rejects Fiorina’s belief that the polarization that seems so visible in our culture reflects the political beliefs of only a highly active political class. Rather, Abramowitz writes, “Polarization in Washington reflects polarization within the public.”
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Most significantly, we see that the two major political parties have both become more philosophically homogeneous over time.
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White southern conservatives migrated to the Republican Party while newly enfranchised blacks identified with the party of civil rights, the Democrats.
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The increasingly conservative Republican Party became less welcoming to moderate Republicans and over time many moderates left to become independents or Democrats.
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This is documented by Matthew Levendusky who finds that public opinion has not shifted markedly toward the ideological poles, but rather that today people have more closely linked their partisanship with their beliefs.
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We see outrage as a practical and savvy response to political, technological, and economic shifts that have transformed the media landscape since the 1980s
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We’ll consider just one here: the fragmentation of the audience as users have dispersed across the rapidly expanding array of media choices on and offline.
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With this niche-orientation, individual cable channels can afford to offend segments of the market that are not their target audience.
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Indeed, it is our argument that it has been able to solidify into a genre largely because of this profitability.
