By Emily Hoerner
What do Walter Lippmann, Walter Cronkite, Carl Bernstien, Bob Woodward, and Edward Murrow all have in common, aside from being some of the greatest nonpartisan reporters in modern journalism.
Well, according to an Op-Ed article by Cass R. Sunstein in today’s New York Times, they may be the ones responsible for increasing the political polarization of the masses.
The column says that ultra liberal and conservative news organizations — think Fox News — aren’t what causes the public to be more polarized. It’s actually the news reporters who are putting forward both sides of the story that drives a person to move further to the left or right of the ideological scale.
A.K.A, those great reporters who uncovered government mistakes and covered controversial issues by shedding light on all sides of a story are the ones to blame.
Although the column seems well supported, I must disagree with a few of the key points.
Firstly, I understand that hearing information from the both sides of an argument doesn’t necessarily make you change your mind.
This makes me think of an example my Introduction to Psychology professor told me freshman year of college. He said our mind often justifies our own actions through a process called “cognitive dissonance.”
For example, he told us, think about when people smoke cigarettes and don’t quit. When a smoker hears news or advice about the nasty side effects of tobacco, he or she doesn’t necessarily listen to the advice, take it to heart, and quit their addictive habits all together. What usually happens instead is that the smoker will justify their own reasons for smoking in retaliation to the advice they disagree with. Perhaps they will say, “well everyone gets cancer now anyway,” or “if it was really so bad many people wouldn’t still smoke like me.”
This is what the columnist is essentially claiming. You see a point of view you do not like, then you see the point of view you do approve of. You use your favorite opinion to render the oppositional one irrelevant. Thus your views would be to be moving closer to the extremes.
This point makes perfect sense. But if this idea is true, then why has polarization changed dramatically in only the past 40 years?
If news that presents an objective story with all sides drives polarization, why didn’t it start at the advent of modern journalism in the 1900’s with the muckracker movement? And what about Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion book in 1922? Why didn’t polarization drastically increase when the great Walter Cronkite reported over the television in the 1960’s and 70’s? If the main idea is that unbiased news coverage created our current state of polarization, it seems that it should have happened years ago.
This column also assumes that the public is indeed more polarized than ever before, without providing data that implies such a claim. If the public is truly polarized then why back in the 90’s did they elect President Bill Clinton two terms in a row, someone who bargained with both sides of the aisle. And why in December of 2011 was the gridlocked Congress’ approval rating only 11 percent? If the public really wanted polarization, they should have been proud of their representatives for refusing to budge for the sake of getting something passed.
I don’t know whether the public is polarized or not — but if people are, I have to believe it’s because of something more than an unbiased story in their local newspaper.
The Path to Polarization - A Look at Generations 