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Editorial
Conservatives get most of their news from fewer sources
Friday, October 24, 2014
If you think America has become too polarized, you might not have to look as far as Washington to find the reason.
You might check the buttons on your remote control to see which ones are worn out.
We were a lot more homogonized when everyone tuned in to the 5:30 p.m. news to see what Walter Cronkite had to say about the Vietnam war or the Watergate scandal.
Cronkite, for his part, felt the responsibility to present a balanced report on the current happenings, his traditional journalistic training winning the vast majority of days over rating or management pressures.
With only three major networks -- all of them taking cues from traditional news sources like the New York Times -- viewers had the choice of few flavors on the media menu.
Not so today.
First cable television, then the Internet, created an extensive a la carte selection of takes on the day's occurrences.
But many of us don't take advantage of the myriad offerings.
That's especially true of the "consistent conservatives" polled by the Pew Research Journalism Project.
According to the new study, 47 percent of the people in this group cite Fox News as their main source of news about the government and politics.
They also expressed more distrust than trust of 24 of the 36 news sources measured in the survey, but 88 percent of them said they trusted Fox News.
Consistent conservatives are more likely than those in other ideological groups to hear political opinions that are in line with their own views, and are more likely to have friends who share their own political views. Two-thirds say most of their close friends share their views on government and politics.
Those with consistent liberal views, however, rely on a wider variety of news sources -- 15 percent CNN, 12 percent MSNBC, 13 percent NPR and 10 percent New York Times. They say they trust 28 of the 36 news outlets in the survey -- NPR, PBS and the BBC the most.
They are, however, more likely to block or "defriend" someone on a social network, as well as end a personal friendship, because of politics.
And, they are more likely to follow issue-based groups rather than political parties or candidates in their Facebook feeds.
We don't disagree that much of the traditional media tended to fall toward the left of the political spectrum. We once heard a representative of one of our state's major newspapers say he favored a more liberal stance because that would make the newspaper more attractive to a wider audience.
Bernard Goldberg's book "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News," was an eye-opener when it was published in 2001, if it is to be believed.
But do we have trouble with media outlets which deliberately bias the news to pander to a certain audience in order to increase market share.
Cultivating friends and hearing viewpoints from all parts of the political spectrum in pursuit of the truth is much more invigorating personally and much more helpful in the long run to our political system and society in general.