According
to the “Ideological
Placement of Each Source’s Audience” graph, the “[a]verage ideological
placement on a 10-point scale of ideological consistency of those who got news
from each source in the past week….” for Fox News on the conservative side and MSNBC
and CNN on the liberal side are roughly equal, which feels intuitively okay. But
Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh Show, The Blaze, Sean Hannity Show, and Glenn Beck
Program equidistant from ground zero with New Yorker and Slate? This led me to
look at the questions, and this
is what I found.
But
if the Conservative position is “Government is almost always wasteful and
inefficient,” shouldn’t the liberal position be “Government is almost always useful
and efficient” or something of the sort? If the Conservative position is “Government
regulation of business usually does more harm than good,” shouldn’t the liberal
position be “Government regulation of business usually does more good than harm”?
And
so on. You can modify the conservative positions to make them symmetrical with
the liberal positions, but the point remains the same: Maybe I’m missing
something or making a huge mistake here, but the dividing line between “conservative”
and “liberal” in the Pew survey seems to be clearly skewed to the right. Now, I
do not think that Pew has a hidden ideological agenda here. Rather, this is a
reflection of public discourse landscape in the United States today.
In
any case, it’s always useful to look at the data behind the graph, and how that
data is collected.
No comments:
Post a Comment