The Partisan Media Bubble Is The Problem
New data show 1 in 7 Americans are plugging themselves into the partisan bullshit machine, and rarely exposing themselves to inconvenient facts.
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The Dominion-Fox News case is not just about defamation, but also about the spreading of bullshit about elections and voting. The antidote to these lies wasn’t supposed to be lawsuits - it was supposed to be 24-7 access to infinite information that would debunk such bullshit, humiliate its purveyors, and anchor the discourse in facts.
But new data released days before the Dominion settlement suggest the opposite has happened — amid that deluge of information, more and more Americans have ensconced themselves in an impenetrable bubble of partisan bullshit, never bothering to peek their heads out so they can be alerted to inconvenient facts.
The key findings from researchers at Berkeley and Yale are stark: Roughly 1 in 7 Americans are consuming more than 8 hours of partisan media. That’s comparable to the total viewership of the network broadcast news programs, and more than the total amount of people who subscribe to all American newspapers.
In other words: Instead of reading the basic (if often imperfect) reporting in newspapers, more people are now being brainwashed by millionaire TV anchors and pundits whose entire business model is ripping, reading and distorting that reporting for their own partisan cause.
And here’s the kicker: “Partisan media consumers rarely consume cross-cutting channels; few partisan media consumers also consume national broadcast news, and even fewer consume both their side’s and the other side’s partisan media.”
These findings, coupled with Fox News’ behavior detailed in the Dominion case, help explain why a recent poll showed nearly two-thirds of Republicans still believe the 2020 election was stolen, despite no factual evidence for that belief.
But it also goes the other way. As just one example: Democratic-leaning partisan media convinced large swaths of its audience to believe all sorts of Russiagate theories that were not substantiated by facts.
At The Lever, we do something that has become exceedingly rare in media: Rather than shill for a particular political party, we hold politicians of both parties accountable. We are a cross-cutting news outlet.
The problem, of course, is that news-consuming audiences have been conditioned to judge information not on its merits, but on whether it can be weaponized for or against their preferred party. That is the partisan ghost in the media machine, blowing us further away from the “trust but verify” ethos and toward even more bullshit.
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