Yeah, I know... "no shit", "water is wet", and "thank you Captain Obvious". Still, it's interesting to see a three year Harvard study confirm it.
‘Network Propaganda’ takes a closer look at media and American politics
Based on a three-year study of the media ecosystem surrounding the 2016 presidential election, a new book from the Berkman Klein Center examines the data in depth
https://today.law.harvard.edu/network-p ... -politics/
A major contribution of the book is what the researchers deem an “asymmetric polarization” model that stems from their research on partisan media ecosystems. The model, created with data from the media sources most-cited during and after the election period, shows that left-wing media outlets are more closely aligned with centrist media outlets, though the right-wing media sources are much more skewed and “are operating in their own media world,” Roberts explained. The researchers found that this pattern was evident during the election and that it was even more pronounced during the first year of the Trump presidency.
“There are clearly two sides, and those two sides are not the same. The right is more insular; it’s more extreme; it’s more partisan,” Faris said of their findings. “That’s not a subjective opinion; that’s an empirical observation. And much of what we try to do in this book is to document that and understand what it means and how it’s reflected in different behavior.”
full article:
https://today.law.harvard.edu/network-p ... -politics/
Nothing came out more clearly than that the right wing was unique, distinct, insular, and that left media and center left and center media were all part of the same ecosystem -- all the way from the editorially conservative Wall Street Journal to genuine left media -- occupy the single media ecosystem where sometimes some sides definitely were pushing political perspectives, but they had to be anchored in reality, because they were part of a media ecosystem where both the producers and the consumers were paying attention to a broad range of media that were committed to some basis in fact, and to having some level of accountability and responsibility for the truthfulness of what was being said.
And the critical difference is not that there aren't crazy clickbait sites on Facebook that try to get people who have left-wing orientations to click on them. They exist.
But those stories don't survive as long, because they are part of an ecosystem that says, “Stop. This story is nonsense.”
Whereas what happens on the right is that no matter how crazy the story, there will be some major media with high impact -- whether it's [Sean] Hannity on Fox News, whether it's Limbaugh, whether it's Breitbart -- that will pick up the story, reframe it, tell it again, identify it as true, and then everyone will start circulating it.
So it’s a completely different dynamic on the right than on the left.
And it's that dynamic that allowed some of the Russian propaganda to propagate. It’s that dynamic that allowed the fake news clickbait providers to make a lot more money on the right than on the left.
It’s the fact that the people who are in there really have lost an anchor in reality that has made them so susceptible to propaganda, both foreign and domestic.
To the best we can tell from surveys, it looks like it's about half to 60% of Republicans -- which is to say somewhere between 25% and 35%, or between a quarter and a third of the American population in general -- exists in cult-like isolation in a right-wing media ecosystem.
And it's that difference: not the supply of crazy stories; they exist on the left and the right, not even the excitement of people on the left and the right to share on Facebook the craziest story. It’s that dynamic of the top media repeating, confirming, accrediting and recycling, that made the difference.
To the point that by December of 2016, 46% of Trump voters told a YouGov poll that they believed there was some truth in the Clinton pedophilia story.
That's not just crazy Facebook on the margins. That can only happen through a committed propagandist effort by the most viewed and the most trusted form of media on the right, which is Fox News.
full article:
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la ... story.html
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." —Voltaire
"They want to take away your hamburgers. This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved." —Sebastian Gorka