Red Media/Blue Media

The Washington post this morning presented an article on the effects of Fox News on the 2000 election. Evidently a Stanford professor and a colleague did some research that suggests that turnout was enhanced for the GOP in 2000 because of the existence of Fox news. It went on to suggest that democrats preferred CNN and NPR and republicans preferred Fox.

The Post article concludes - "The results found strong evidence that people apply a political litmus test to the news, avoiding sources they view as unfriendly while seeking out compatible sources, a finding confirmed by researchers at Polimetrix in a national study with a representative sample of adults done in cooperation with the Stanford lab.

The Republicans even preferred to get news about sports and travel from Fox while Democrats didn't have as strong a preference on non-political stories, Lyengar found."

This is one of those chicken and egg stories. Ideally, most people would prefer their news sources to be objective, to not bias results and headlines. Yet, what is often referred to as the MSM (Main Stream Media) cannot seem to get that. However, variations in turnout between the 1996 and 2000 elections may have been caused by a number of other factors and it is not clear to me that the existence of one news source would have created a change in the vote.

There a plenty of other explanations that are equally plausible. Assume that Fox were not in existence for the 2000 election (Fox was created after 1996 and before 2000). Would the uptick in conservative talk radio have been slower or faster? Would the fall off of readership in major newspapers (the NYT for example) been slower or faster? Was the GOP "revolution" of 1994 - which predates Fox by several years - a part of the reason that Bush won in 2000? All of these issues raise questions about the conclusions of the research.

The conclusions of the research may be correct - to the extent that they suggest that more conservative voters prefer certain media outlets. But that does not suggest a causative relationship in determining election outcomes. I do not find the MSM trustworthy. I am bothered by all of the coverage (Fox, CNN and NPR) on many issues. I am annoyed by newstainment. But I have a lot of friends whose political beliefs are different than mine who have the same feelings. The deeper disconnect is the attempt to impose values into the new process that don't facilitate in the average person understanding the world's events.

Steve Sample, the President of USC, in a book he wrote with Warren Bennis called The Contrarian Guide to Leadership suggested a subversive but interesting experiment. When I was an undergraduate student I was told that to be informed one had to read "the paper of record" - the gray lady - the NYT. But Sample wondered what would happen if for six months he did not read a paper. He found that two things happened. First, the big things he heard about through other channels and second, he had more time to think about the important issues of the day. So by not doing what was expected of people of his generation, he came out better.

We live in a world where news can come from many sources and where listening to one source, with a biased response, can help put on blinders. The challenge is not whether this decides elections - the wider range of news sources probably has an effect on elections - but the bigger question is how we get news sources that a closer to reporting and less attracted to editorializing. Wouldn't it be nice to see just black and white instead of red and blue when you picked up your paper?