Transcript
JONATHAN RAUCH: This notion that media polarizes the country; if you read Diana's fine chapter, you will find out that there is virtually no hard evidence that it does as far as we can tell. I think it is at least as likely that the country polarizes the media. It is not a coincidence that the same period in which we have seen polarized media with more ideology shouting at each other is the period when the country has gone that direction, and we know to some extent why that is that case. It is because Americans have sorted themselves by ideology and party, so all the Blues are on one side and all the Reds are on the other. Two different parties make it much easier to have concentrated shout fests when people are separated this way instead of intermingled through party and ideology. Well, it is no surprise that the media would follow that or people, too.
I expect there is causality in both directions. The people polarize the media and vice versa. But I suspect a lot of what is going on is to some extent shooting the messenger -- blaming the media for, in fact, reflecting changes in society.
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What we forget is the fact that we have this tremendous proliferation of sources, many of them very small, many of them virile. We have gone from a hub and spokes system of media where everybody passes through a few major hubs to a network system of media where people are just all over the place. So it is not even clear to me that polarization in the most visible media outlets, the ones that we had on the screen just now, is really all that important. I certainly, like Gregg, welcome the diversity of sources and the fact that the public can now serve to a large extent as its own editor.
Thus, it is not clear to me if polarized dialogue is a bad thing. I think it may be a good thing. I think it is more likely to be a good thing than polarized politics in any case. It is also not clear to me that the media are more than minor players in polarization of dialogue, if that. What I do worry about is -- Gregg and I did not rehearse these comments and I didn't know he was going to say this but I share exactly the same worry -- not the ratio of the civil to the uncivil, the hot versus the cool, and the loud versus the mild but of opinions to reportage. It concerns me that opinion is very, very inexpensive to produce. Anybody can get on TV and spout dribble. Anybody can stand here at this podium spout dribble. I cite myself as evidence of that fact right now.
It is very expensive to produce news, to go out and find things out, to send correspondents around the world, to get them edited sensibly and responsibly. All that costs real money. What we are seeing over time is the diversification, I believe, away from news and toward opinion. My hope is that will put a higher market premium on the value of news and increase over time the price that it commands. But my fear is that instead of looking at polarization, what we ought to be looking at is what Gregg calls opinionization, that is, the proliferation of cheap sources of words that fill the air but actually are awfully short on content.
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