HYPOTHESES IN THE MAKING

 

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.]

[Further Note:  Phew, it’s over.  Happy New Years!!]

Earlier in this blog,[1] this writer presented a listing of findings from a Pew Research Center report that offered demographic information comparing the electorate in 1992 and 2016.[2]  The goal was to observe changes the electorate had experienced during the intermittent years.  While that is helpful in understanding the nation’s politics in and of itself, it also suggests reasons for the polarization the nation is experiencing.

          While this posting reviews those changes in summary, the review will spur this writer to offer some hypotheses that will be tested by the information offered by another Pew publication[3] – which will serve as the topic of this blog’s next posting.  But, at minimum, this first Pew offering can stand on its own and provide the reader some insight.

          In terms of ethnicity and race (as a combined factor), the nation has gone through some changes:  non-Hispanic whites make up a smaller percentage of the electorate (by 14% points), Hispanic share has doubled (5% to 9%), blacks increased (10% to 12%), mixed-race grew (1% to 5%), and total non-whites went up (16% to 26%).  Whites’ share of the electorate fell to 60.7% and is projected to be below 50% by 2045.

          Just these limited numbers explain quite a bit and the demographic shifts spell out advantages for the Democratic Party as that party is constituted today.  That is, that party garners the bulk of non-white populations around the country.  Surprisingly, the Pew report states that the Republicans have also gained among these groups but not to the extent that Democrats have.

               In terms of age, the nation is older, and the older set has shifted from being more pro-Democratic to being more pro-Republican.  Americans are better educated and educated people who tended be Republican in ’92, tended to be Democratic in ’16.  When one mixes education with ethnicity/race an interesting change is highlighted, whites with college degrees increased as a proportion of the electorate.  And Democrats with no college dropped significantly (55% to 32%).  Bottom line, Democrats have benefited from changes in educational attainment numbers.

          Then there is the effect of religion on politics.  Those who do not consider themselves as belonging to a religion significantly went up (8% to 21%).  This change seems to have benefited Democrats.  Religious affiliation maintained its numbers among Republicans.  Summarily, Pew observes that Republicans are strong among evangelical Protestants or white Catholics during those twenty years but overall, they account for a smaller portion of the electorate.

          With the easy ability to categorize so many groups according to identity factors such as race, ethnicity, and religion – and to some degree age – with political parties and all that that represents, one can surmise that these factors add to polarization.  And that is the most prominent hypothesis one can make from this information.

          This posting ends with a statement that more specifically captures this hypothesis: 

… [F]or those voters who are concerned over identity issues, the growth of more recent immigrant population – including first generation Americans – less white-based/traditional religiously affiliated people, and an increase in non-religiously affiliated people, life seems to be becoming more secular, less white, and more urban.  In 1992 the US urban population was 76% and in 2016 it was 82% (82.5% in 2019).[4]  Conservative, white, religiously prone people in the US, one can guess, are feeling more and more threatened.

To test these hypothesized relationships, this blog, as stated above, will relate another Pew research report, “Urban, Suburban and Rural Residents’ Views on Key Social and Political Issues,” that Pew issued in 2018.  That will be the topic for the next posting of this blog.

---

[1] These findings are reported in the posting, “Some Demographics in Election Years,” Gravitas:  A Voice for Civics (a blog), September 1, 2020.  The reader can see the actual percentage amounts the findings here indicate.

[2] “1.  The Changing Composition of the Political Parties,”  The Pew Research Center (September 13, 2016), accessed August 31, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/09/13/1-the-changing-composition-of-the-political-parties/ .

[3] Kim Parker, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Anna Brown, Richard Fry, D’Vera Cohn, Ruth Igielnik, “2.  Urban, Suburban and Rural Residents’ Views on Key Social and Political Issues, Pew Research Center:  Social and Demographic Trends (May 22, 2018), accessed January 1, 2021, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/urban-suburban-and-rural-residents-views-on-key-social-and-political-issues/ .

[4] See “Urban Population (% of Total Population) – United States,”  The World Bank, n.d., accessed December 30, 2020, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?end=2019&locations=US&start=1978 .

A DIFFERENT CASE ON THE LEFT

 

[Note:  From time to time, this blog issues a set of postings that summarize what the blog has been emphasizing in its previous postings.  Of late, the blog has been looking at various obstacles civics educators face in teaching their subject.  It’s time to post a series of such summary accounts.  The advantage of such summaries is to introduce new readers to the blog and to provide a different context by which to review the blog’s various claims and arguments.  This and upcoming summary postings will be preceded by this message.] 

 To continue this blog’s look at the national polarized landscape, a Pew Research Center report provides information about the left side of that divide.  The report relates to the 2016 election and basically describes how the left relies on a journalism that has in place well-established structures and processes that guarantee its objectivity.[1]

          Of course, as this blog has just reported, this stands in counter distinction to the right-wing ecosystem that instead of utilizing long-standing protocols to bolster truth-telling, has utilized rhetorical techniques – including memes – that result in dubious news accounts.  This is further enhanced by the relatively unified set of interests its party, the Republican Party, represents.  When everyone tends to see the world through a single lens, those observations are more easily deceived and less demanding of objectivity.

The Republican Party counts on a limited set of groups – businesspeople, fundamentalist religious groups, and disaffected labor groups smarting over the loss of jobs to automation and cheap labor nations – to make up its base.  That naturally leads to allow for a singular, mostly ideological messaging to take hold and bolster existing biases among these people.

The left and its party – the Democratic Party – has instead a wide variety of groups making up its ranks.  This includes from conservative minority-religious groups, e.g., most Jews and fundamentalist blacks, to urban, professional groups such as academics and well-trained technologists.  Of course, these are tendencies, and this account is not meant to describe how all members of these groups vote. 

But to the degree this alignment exists among Democrats, given the proclivity for disagreement among such a high level of diversity, this alliance demands to a greater degree objective news sources.  Therefore, they rely on news outlets having well-established structures and protocols guaranteeing both talent and objectivity in gathering and reporting the news. 

Such an arrangement, though, does not protect those well-established newspapers – e.g., The New York Times and The Washington Post – and national TV news organizations – e.g., CBS and NBC – from being described as FAKE NEWS by the right-wing ecosystem. 

But this reliance on these news outlets allows Democrats and the left to formulate fact-based positions on the vibrant issues of the day.  That arrangement, in a more varied landscape, helps the party to avoid messaging – and accompanying proposals – that appeals to or is demanded by its more extreme members – a faction currently called progressives. 

As for the news organizations themselves, they seek to not be identified as the leftist press and seek to be considered simply the FREE PRESS.  This is backed by their protocols for gathering and reporting the news.  They rely on their audiences to be on the more centrist elements of the electorate both among left and right of center voters and these voter, in turn, make up the vast percentage of the electorate.

And associated with this avoidance of extremism, it also demands that their information sources to avoid exclusively relying on extremists.  They interview all relevant sources, but they keep those sources’ biases revealed to the readers and viewers. 

Central to those endeavors, those source must be treated objectively, and in turn, the news organizations must maintain unbiased methodologies in gathering and reporting their stories and in formulating their editorial positions.  They only revert to withholding information about their sources when those sources will tell their stories only upon being granted anonymity.  In that case, journalists have gone to jail instead of revealing who those sources are.

So, in summary, establishment journalists do not take up ideological positioning in their reporting and try to maintain a balanced perspective about how they present their stories.  On this last point, Ezra Klein describes these journalistic entities as “sources that root their identity in … being antagonistic toward political movements.”[2] 

In other words, the established press strives – not always successfully – to avoid taking sides.  The resulting, achieved balance serves the needs of the left in that that side, as described above and in previous postings, can maintain itself only with a good dose of compromise within its ranks.  Compromise is served by information sources being neutral and believable.

Some might note exceptions to this general description.  Many, mostly on the right, accuse CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, and other outlets of being too pro-left in their reporting.  Also, there is some research by academic sources that definitely claims that there is a leftist bias among establishment sources.  One such study is by Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeff Milyo of the University of Chicago who published a study back in 2005 using data from the 1990-2003.[3] 

They found Fox News Special Report and The Washington Times as conservative.  They also found Newsweek, The New York Times, Time magazine, CBS Evening News, USA Today, and NBC Nightly News as having a definite leftist bias.  Balanced news outlets included ABC Good Morning America and NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.  Moderately left were CNN’s NewsNight with Aaron Brown, The Washington Post, NPR’s Morning Edition, and ABC WorldNews Tonight.  Not ranked were The Wall Street Journal and talk radio.

While this study is a bit dated and counters the thrust of what this account is claiming, the Groseclose-Milyo study is not judged as debunking the general observations this review has of the current media.  If considered in relative terms – comparing current day right-wing journalism and left-wing journalism – the general judgement expressed here is still considered justified and worthy of mention. 

And this leads one to further consider how the more balanced journalists advance in their profession.  Higher reputations belong to a relatively small number of news organizations and they provide rewards to those considered skilled at being excellent news people.  How?  By hiring them for more lucrative jobs.  One is considered to be at the top of this profession if one has secured a position at The New York Times or The Washington Post, or on one of the national news networks.

So, the basic point here is that the right – in terms of its voters – due to their distinguishing unity, is more open to disreputable sources that one finds on social media and rest of the right-wing ecosystem.  On the other hand, the left is “protected” from such journalism given the nature of the politics that diverse groups demand. 

With diversity, it is more difficult to cull a varied followship with a united rhetorical messaging that social media tends to produce.  The only exception to that difficulty is messaging based on objectified reporting that results in verifiable truth.[4]  The established press come much closer to that standard when compared to the right-wing social media, outlets such as Newsmax, and talk show hosts as Rush Limbaugh.

---

[1] Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman, and Yochai Benkler, “Partisanship, Propaganda, & Disinformation: Online Media & the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election,” Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Library (n.d.), accessed August 19, 2020, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/76a9/3eb0bed8ff032c44186678c5279f20cc5ff8.pdf?_ga=2.230250332.1151241653.1597869609-1463880478.1597869609 .

[2] Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarized (New York, NY:  Avid Reader Press, 2020), 236.

[3] Robert J. Barro, “The Liberal Media:  It’s No Myth,” Business Week/Online, June 14, 2004, accessed December 29, 2020, https://scholar.harvard.edu/barro/files/04_0614_liberalmedia_bw.pdf .  Of note, Barro is a founding member of the movement, new classical macroeconomics, that began as a response to the condition of stagflation in the 1970s and is currently an editor-in-chief at Quarterly Journal of Economics, the scholarly journal that published the Groseclose-Milyo study.

[4] This reference to objectified methods should not be confused with the reductionism a scientist practices in a scientific study.  In this form, journalism more resembles responsible historical study by reputable historians.  Journalism is often described informally as the first stab at history.