I am, on occasion, asked about my media diet. I am a grazer. Since Congress is my primary professional area of expertise, I read Roll Call regularly, and I check RealClearPolitics every morning, which gives me the latest polls, and lets me click over to a selection of the big items for the day. I am an email subscriber to the Hotline. I have to see how the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal at least present the news of the day, and it is useful to compare the front pages of Fox, CNN and MSNBC as points of reference because others look at them, even though they suck. Beyond that, The Monkey Cage is a must-read for any political scientist, as is Crooked Timber for any general scholar, a smattering of business news, and a general attempt to see how various perspectives cover politics. There's more, but I'm being brief. I spend a lot of my time grazing. (Mmmmm.... cud.) One of the general pieces of advice I give is that everyone should read both Paul Krugman and John Cochrane's blogs. Don't exist within an ideological cocoon.
The problems with ideological cocoons are as follows. First, all you do is reinforce your existing beliefs. You never question your own assumptions. That's... baaaaad. If you never change your mind about anything, it means you aren't thinking. Scholarly reference to that book I always mention: John Zaller's The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. If you only expose yourself to messages consistent with your existing beliefs, everything just gets reinforced. Don't do that.
There is information you will miss. One of the important observations in the sequence of National Election Studies surveys is as follows. Consider the 2004 and 2012 surveys. Why these surveys? Because economically, they were relatively similar. Economic growth, but not spectacular growth. If you were a Democrat in 2004, you underrated the economy in 2004. Why? Republican president. If you were a Republican in 2012, you underrated the economy in 2012. Why? Democratic president.
You know what contributes to this? Lack of information. If you were watching Fox in 2012, they weren't covering the economy in a... fact-based manner, and in 2004, if you were getting your news from MSNBC or some other lefty news source, ditto. On the second part, they were more likely to avoid the topic than outright lie the way Fox does, but the effect is similar. You wind up misinformed.
Then there is the issue of understanding how others think. Will you get a better sense of how conservatives think about economics by reading John Cochrane's blog, or by reading Paul Krugman's description of how conservative's think? Will you get a better sense of how liberals think about economics by reading Paul Krugman, or by reading John Cochrane's description of Paul Krugman?
Consider the following gem of idiocy from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: "Trump is in the back pocket of billionaires."
Trump is a billionaire! He isn't nearly as rich as he says he is, but... he is a billionaire! Whitehouse (yes, that's his name) is falling prey to a variation on the very fallacy I pointed out in last Tuesday's post-- attributing opposition to corruption because it is easier than just accepting that someone disagrees with you. Trump is a self-enriching billionaire. He doesn't give a shit about anyone else because he's a sociopath, and that's the definition of a sociopath. He isn't in anyone's "back pocket," except maybe Putin. OK, Putin is probably effectively a billionaire, but that isn't what Whitehouse was saying. Whitehouse was rejecting the notion of sincerity. Trump is sincere. Sincerely self-interested.
People disagree with you, and if you want to understand politics, you need to understand why, and not simply attribute any and every disagreement to someone being bought off. Don't just pull that "it's common sense" crap. Like I wrote last week, appeals to "common sense" are bullshit.
So, you need to challenge your assumptions, get a broader array of information, and understand why people hold positions different from those that you hold. That requires not cocooning yourself within a comfortable, little ideological media bubble.
But they're sooooo comfy! For a little while now, I've been posting on the politics of gun control. So much of this blog, to a casual observer, might look like just an extra-snarky version of a standard-issue, Trump-bashing academic's blog. I'm a professor! I got my Ph.D. from Berkeley! I hate Trump and rant about racism and misogyny! Throw in a bunch of links to books, articles and some seriously pretentious music, and one might think that the "unmutual" thing, with all of the Carlin-speak is just an affectation. Don't worry, I'm really one of you! I'll never challenge your core beliefs and this is a safe space for squishy lefty-ism!
Except... no. Just... no.
And then, something like a mass shooting happens, the left turns to one of its sacred cows-- gun control-- and I start asking a different set of questions, poking at the left. Now, I can poke at the right on this one too because... arming teachers?! Where the fuck does one even start on this shit?! Hence, my Overton Window post. However, as I have regularly written, the issue of guns drops the collective IQ of this country and simply prevents damn near everyone from thinking rationally. I take this as an opportunity, though, to poke at the left.
And readership drops noticeably. I can watch those numbers! (Hey, whoever you are, you're still reading!)
This isn't a "monetized" site. I write these posts in the morning over my coffee. This is for fun. If you get something out of it, great.
Imagine, though, that I were paid for it, and dependent on that money. I'd be watching those numbers, thinking about a paycheck. If I established an audience that looked for a daily helping of scholarly-but-profane Trump-bashing, and then strayed from that for a while, and readership dropped off, I'd lose money, and that would be an issue for me. I'd be locked into the audience I had established. I'm not, because I do this for fun, and I can write whatever the hell I want. If some people drift away realizing that I'm not who they thought I was, then it's no skin off my back because I was never paid for this in the first place.
But think about this from the perspective of any media outlet that operates on ad revenue. Establish an audience, and that audience will develop expectations. Do anything that breaks from their expectations, and they drift away. Unless you can replace them immediately, you're fucked.
It's fun and easy, and right to bash institutions like Fox and MSNBC. What if they were to change, though? They can't, can they? At least not quickly.
MSNBC took a long time to become what it is, one show at a time. It began as kind of a nothing network with no raison d'etre, and then Olbermann started doing lefty commentary, which slowly transformed the network. Once that reputation was there, though, it was there.
Could Fox become anything other than what it is now? How? Stop running the kinds of shows it runs, and the current audience would stop watching. Who would start? You see the problem.
Ideological media cocoons are problematic in all directions.