Policy

Do liberals read only liberal blogs?

With an online outlet for every viewpoint, the Internet might easily produce " …

Nate Anderson – Apr 19, 2010 10:37 pm | 111

On Friday, I received a press release pitching a new book on how to live like a liberal. The book offers helpful suggestions for:

Watching MSNBC instead of Fox News
Powering a laptop with a solar power-generating backpack
Progressive financial investment
Where and how to find a like-minded mate

… You get the idea. What really caught my eye was item number one: the idea that people of a particular political persuasion should stop watching news produced by those of another. This, it seems, might be a particular problem on the Internet, where the low barriers to publishing mean that anyone can find a viewpoint with which they totally agree, then read only that material.

This idea that the Internet might lead us simply to reinforce our own prejudices rather than challenge them has a long academic pedigree; University of Chicago law prof Cass Sunstein (now in the Obama administration) wrote about the issue in his 2001 book Republic.com. In a later interview with Salon, Sunstein elaborated on the problems of a niche outlet for every viewpoint:

There’s a book, The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, which celebrates the “niche-ification” of the world. I like the book—I should say, I think it’s a very good book—but what’s amazing to me is the extent to which Anderson and the Internet enthusiasts really can’t even see a problem and can’t see the individual and social benefits of being exposed to stuff you didn’t choose…

I don’t like that Rush Limbaugh listeners call themselves “dittoheads.” It’s funny, but it’s kind of horrible. Fox News is a self-identified conservative outlet. The more extreme elements on the left treat their fellow citizens as if they’re idiots, or as if they’re rich people who don’t care about anybody. So, I look at some of our culture, I see demonization, and I think, where does that come from?

Back in the days when many towns had a single newspaper and people could choose from one of three centrist nightly news broadcasts on the major networks, finding and consuming even a single extreme viewpoint from the media could be difficult. Today, it’s a mouse click away.

A new paper out from two University of Chicago researchers claims to take the best look yet at “ideological segregation” on the Internet. Does it happen, and if so, how much of an issue is it?

The authors note that, while it is simple to find views with which one agrees online, the Internet also “dramatically reduces the cost of acquiring information from a wide range of sources.”

To find out how people actually got their news and political opinion online, the research team gathered data on the ideological makeup of news website visitors, and they combined this data with comScore website statistics.

Incomplete segregation

The team concluded that online news consumption is not as segregated as critics fear. The “isolation index” for the Internet is 7.5 percentage points, which represents the “difference between the average conservative’s exposure and the average liberal’s exposure.” This is much higher than broadcast television (1.8 percentage points), which tends to be centrist and inoffensive. It’s also higher than magazines (2.9), cable TV (3.3), and local newspapers (4.1). It is lower than the isolation index for national newspapers (10.4).

In fact, eliminating the Internet altogether would actually reduce ideological segregation—but only from 4.9 to 3.8.

Still, the difference between liberal and conservative Web surfers isn’t high, and it certainly doesn’t approach anything resembling a doomsday scenario in which people use the Internet to create only echo chambers for their own preconceptions. “News consumers with extremely high or low exposure are rare,” says the study.

Yes, there is all sorts of bitter partisan fare on the Internet, but the authors chalk up much of this material to the “‘long tail’ of political blogs, news aggregators, and activist sites.” While such sites might be important to political news junkies, they “account for a very small share of online consumption.”

Besides, even visitors to such sites often get their news from multiple places and multiple sources The paper notes, for instance, that “visitors of extreme conservative sites such as rushlimbaugh.com and glennbeck.com are more likely than a typical online news reader to have visited nytimes.com. Visitors of extreme liberal sites such as thinkprogress.org and moveon.org are more likely than a typical online newsreader to have visited foxnews.com.”

Of course, there’s one key fact that studies like this can’t tell us: what goes on in the minds of readers. It’s perfectly possible that liberals visit foxnews.com only to outrage themselves over the “fair and balanced” reporting there. And two people of different political viewpoints might read the same news article and come to very different conclusions about what it said and what it means.

It’s also possible that readers of the same site might simply read different articles depending on their political persuasion. Conservatives might avidly read the New York Times, but they might ignore the paper’s op-ed pages altogether.

And, as the paper notes, there is “no evidence that the Internet is becoming more segregated over time.”

Nate Anderson Deputy Editor

Nate is the deputy editor at Ars Technica. His most recent book is In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World, which is much funnier than it sounds.

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