How Do Liberals Learn About Politics?

Great Debates
61

Take my sister as a liberal example. She lives in San Antonio and reads the local paper, which is no great shakes. She does’t subscribe to any news magazine. Her daytime TV watching is quiz shows and the like. So, she doesn’t know a huge amount about political issues.

The interesting point is that she feels intellectually superior to Rush Limbaugh’s audience – and by a big margin. I once pointed out to her that the “dittoheads” spend hours each week learning about issues and political leaders (from a one-sided POV), while she spends those same hours watching Jeopardy. That argument made no impression on her feeling of superiority.

Another example – my friend J. marched in the demonstration last weekend. She’s sure that Ashcroft’s main goal is to reduce our civil liberties. I pointed out that he has responsibility for preventing crime and terrorism, since the FBI is a part of the Justice Dept. My friend said she thought the FBI was a part of Homeland Security. Yet, her ignorance of Ashcroft’s basic function and responsibility didn’t moderate her strong views about him.

The liberals on this board are nothing like my sister or my friend. You folks are knowledgable and interested and intelligent – a pleasure to debate with.

62

Sounds like we need a bunch of Venn diagrams. How many of the conservatives mentioned in the OP watch Fox, CNN, and read all those newspapers etc… and How many use just one media outlet.

Then do the same for Liberals. Perhaps one side uses more media sources than the other.

63

december, we clearly travel in very different circles. While I know plenty of emotive, non-thinking liberals, I could tell you plenty of knee-jerk conservative stories too. We all have anecdotes, and they’re all equally valid.

I second your comment that liberals (and conservatives) on this board are almost without fail very well-informed, and a pleasure to read and engage, whether I agree with them or not. And I can’t think of anyone this applies to more than you.

64

Well, I think that’s about the fourth or fifth insult that’s been hurled at me in this thread, for doing nothing but pointing people to legitimate research and asking what it means.

I’ll tell you, I don’t have any real theories as to what the data means, but judging by some of the responses in this thread, I’m beginning to develop some…

I’ll say this - my own anecdotal evidence backs up what December said above. I have lots of liberal friends, and lots of conservative friends. My liberal friends do NOT read political books or even follow the news much. My conservative friends, on the other hand, do. Voraciously. And not just bestsellers or right-wing polemics like Ann Coulter vomits out. History books, philosophy books, etc. Even my brother, who has a grade 9 education, is a news junkie. And when he came to visit me recently, he brought a copy of Guliani that he was reading.

Again, the people on this board are an obvious exception. Anyone willing to step into Great Debates and slug it out is almost by definition going to be well-read and well-versed in current affairs. 'Cause if they’re not, they get slaughtered and leave. So this is a self-selected crowd.

But those of you who think Liberals are more well-rounded, or open-minded, or whatever - forget about youself, and tell me: what are your liberal friends like? How many of them are like you? How many devour the news hours a day, read political books and journals, etc? Be honest.

So I think the data represents what it seems to - by about a 2-1 margin, conservatives are more likely to pay attention to the media.

Do I have a theory as to why? Not really. As I keep saying, I’m open to ideas. But I DON’T think it’s because liberals don’t self-identify as liberals - if there were just as many liberals watching the news and reading books, but they just didn’t want to claim the title of “liberal”, then we still have a tough time explaining why liberal shows like Donahue tank in the marketplace, why there are fewer liberal books on the bestseller list, and why liberal magazines have a much smaller readership overall than conservative magazines.

And I do NOT believe that liberals read more varied sources of the news. First, the data doesn’t support it. In fact, it suggests the opposite - conservatives are more likely to consume liberal sources than liberals are likely to consume conservative sources. Note that the data shows that more conservatives than liberals listen to and watch LIBERAL programming (NPR, The News Hour, etc). On the other hand, the overtly conservative sources mentioned have almost no liberal listeners. Second, my personal experience is that this is not the case. And third, I’ve seen no other evidence of that.

Maybe here’s a clue: The liberals that I know are very smug about it. They’ll fire a liberal soundbite into your face faster than you can blink. If you try to debate them, they get angry and shut down. In short, they don’t feel the need to defend their ideas, because they think the correctness of those ideas is self-evident to anyone with a brain. And this thread is proving my point, because there’s an awful lot of insult-hurling mixed with conservative-bashing and self-congratulatory back-patting going on in this thread, as Saen pointed out above.

People who don’t feel the need to justify their beliefs are less likely to feel the need to reinforce them through study. There. That’s a theory as to why.

Rickjay: No, I no you didn’t. Others, however, have. You were one of the three or four people in this train wreck to take the question seriously and answer it thoughtfully. Thanks.

blanks said:

But that’s not what the data says. If it were just that conservative books sold well and conservative TV and radio did better, I’d say you could be on to something. But the phenomen stretches across all media. As I said, conservatives even listen to NPR more than liberals do.

MSU 1978 said:

Ah, but maybe this helps explain a certain mindset? If young people go into college and the liberal bias of their professors re-affirms their own beliefs, perhaps they come out of college so certain that their beliefs are correct that they don’t feel the need to consider evaluating them or keeping up on the literature. On the other hand, speaking as a conservative who went to college, it was four years of being insulted and marginalized… So maybe the college educated conservatives come out feeling as though they have something to prove, whereas the liberals come out thinking there is nothing left they need to learn. Again, just a theory.

65

You’ve forgotten a great institution- the alternative weekly. My first introduction to liberal thought as a kidddy was reading the weekly paper at the local taquaria. Even now I find they tend to be the only well-researched and, for lack of a better word, meaty, source of blatantly liberal information. My town has one typical alternative weekly, a couple somewhat less liberal ones, two liberal student papers, an extreme left weekly and a variety of special interest (queer, new age) weeklys.

66

OK I’ll take a shot.

Liberals aren’t terribly well organized. Exactly what does being “liberal” mean? Are you socially liberal, fiscally conservative? Socially liberal, and fiscally liberal? Are you a Liberal (big “L”) or a liberal? In this country liberal now tends to mean you aren’t conservative, which in turn means that people aren’t inclined to self-identify as liberal. This also means that despite what the Liberal pundits want, a “liberal Rush” won’t work. Liberals aren’t united by any single issue. Abortion? Nope. Some want with restriction, some none at all. War? Some on the fence (me) some against. Welfare? Some want reform, some do not, etc… No single view is popular enough to garner audience.

I also think that liberals are less inclined to like one-sided views. As a liberal I believe that all people have a basic right to voice their opinion, as long as they have the facts on their side. This is not conducive to the forum of the pundit audience. I can’t stand watching most of these shows as I want to hear both sides views without having the speaker run-over by the opposing speaker.

I admit that I have been disillusioned by the national media during this administration, and their failure to question the President and his decisions, or to bring up issues with his staff (Gen. Franks, Harken Oil and Chaney, etc…). If I weren’t a politics whore, this frustration would indeed lead me to follow national news less closely or not at all.

One issue I think that hasn’t been addressed here is that of money. Except for the national news, and NPR, all of the media the Pew study examines, cost money. Cable, newspapers, magazines, and novels, are expensive. I don’t think that there is an argument that conservatives have a higher disposable income than that of liberals, and they choose to spend it on media. Also since liberals tend to be younger I believe that they are just not an audience for national news programing. I didn’t watch the national news often when I was in college, as I was too busy studying and parting.

For the record, I listen to NPR, read the Detroit Free Press and Dallas Morning News Daily, and watch ABC evening news along with the local news nightly. I also watch the Daily Show for some of the juicier clips, and have a subscription to Newsweek

On preview: Wow Sam, that’s quite a slap-in-the-face post there. Thanks for not being inflammatory.

67

Sam

So no response to my correction of your Pew numbers, then?

Apparently not.

This isn’t what the Pew study says, and you’d do well to acknowledge that fact.

68

All I see in the OP is that those who self-identify as conservatives are more likely to respond to opinion polls and surveys than those who self-identify as liberals. I think a similar analasys of radio shows would be equally worthless. To wit: Rush Limbaugh and Laura Schlessinger are going strong, but where are the liberal voices? Maybe liberals are using their radios to listen to The Rolling Stones.

Another thing, is it really fair to say that Donahue lost to O’Reilly? Maybe you didn’t say that, but that’s how I read the 4th paragraph of the OP.

Donahue lost to the daytime soaps and The Price Is Right. O’Reilly won out over Joe Millionaire, Star Search, and… well, everything on the WB.

They were just two entirely different kinds of shows. Put O’reilly up against Bill Maher and now you have a dog race.

By the way, Rush Limbaugh’s late night talk show ran from September 1992 until 1996, when it was cancelled. Did he lose out to ER, Mad About You and Everybody Loves Raymond?

69

You’re talking about his TV show? It was not a talk show. It was a presentation of events that struck him as funny or pointed, plus some satiric skits.

According to Limbaugh, he could have continued the show. He said that he chose not to because he wasn’t offered a fixed time slot. The show ran at different and changing times in different cities.

70

By the way, pantom, thanks for the insight into the reason for the disproportionately small share of self-identified liberals watching CNBC.

71

Sam, you need to get out more. My personal experience is that liberals come in three flavors:

1 - highly intellectual and ridiculously well read and cultured,
2 - low income folks without much time to do much more than keep themselves from falling off the cliff completely, and
3 - uninterested in learning much, but if you scratch the surface of these folks I’ve found that while they self identify as liberals they hold views that would make some conservatives blanch, much less liberals, so I’m not sure how to classify them, other than as merely couch potatoes who’ve never bothered to question their own beliefs.

Conservatives come in all three flavors too, of course, but tend not to be as frequent in flavor 2, although it’s a close thing.
And I’ll say it again: if you’re looking at sources like cable or the Internet that have to be paid for, these will naturally lean well to the right. Poor folks use these services much more sparingly than the well off, for obvious reasons.

72

Your welcome, G. (Only one post every 60 seconds. First time I ever ran into that one, as you can see by the ratio of my post count to the time I’ve been hangin’ out in these parts.)

73

I don’t want to hijack this into a John Ashcroft debate but december, did you see this piece in the Times this week and what is your take on it? I wouldn’t say his main goal is to reduce our civil liberties, but he does seem to regard them as hurdles to be cleared away by whatever means possible.

Sam, to be quite honest I cannot recall a single political statement that any of my professors ever made and I’m totally clueless as to their leanings. I believe a far greater influence is the elementary school system and their devotion to political correctness.

74

<minor aside>

Curious that American Conservatism is one American cultural artefact that nobody else seems to want to buy.

</minor aside>

75

A survey is not research.

Your whining about the response your getting has grown tiresome. You prefaced your OP by saying you were posting something inflammatory, with your december hat on. Then you ran through a little straw-algorithm of weak arguments. You hardly asked what it meant, you told us. Oh poor little old you that you got some volatile responses.

I have little to add to what others have said, since we just went down this road a few months ago, with you yourself citing the Amazon top rated books and proclaiming it evidence of the acumen of conservatives, and me suggesting that the “data” could easily well be explained by conservatives reading a restricted set of books and liberals not. Hopefully that message (that there are eminently reasonable alternative explanations) will take this time, and we won’t be subject to this “proof” of your theorem again.

But it is in some way fun to throw the same old punches back and forth, isn’t it?

76

Putting Rush in the same category as ‘news’ is like putting ‘Am I hot or not’ in the same category as ‘entertainment’. They’re both caricatures.

Like a certain recent conservative president (Cadillac-driving welfare moms anyone?), Rush has a habit of inventing ‘facts’ to suit his rants. The idea that a dittohead is ‘studying’ during the time he (almost always he) is being brainwashed in this way is bunk.

77

I think because he was an intern for Tip O’Neill.

78

Sam, before discussing the implications of the data you present, we should agree on what these numbers are saying. I think your OP misrepresents (unintentionally, I assume) the actual interpretation. Gadarene already pointed that out, but since you have not addressed his/her post, I will try again.

The Pew Research report you quote, gives the percentage of viewers/readers of a given show/magazine that identify themselves as Conservative /Moderate/ Liberal. Some portions of your OP get this right, but some others don’t. For instance:

That’s not what the report says. It says that of the people who claim to read political magazines, 52% of them label themselves as conservatives, vs. 23% as Liberals. Similarly, of the people who claim to be daily newspaper readers, 35% label themselves as conservatives, vs. 18% as liberals. Huge difference of meaning.

To understand the relevance of these numbers, you need to know which percentages of the population label themselves as Conservatives/ Moderate/ Liberals. As Gadarene already pointed out, the numbers we have to go by are those that appear in the same Table “Audience Ideology Profile” under Nationwide Total: Conservative 36%, Moderate ** 38%**, Liberal 18%. When you compare these percentages with the ones for the different media outlets, I think it is clear that you can’t draw the conclusions you hint at in your OP.

Given the Nationwide Total percentages, if you were to conduct a research in supermarkets across the USA, asking the people who buy oranges, apples, potatoes, etc, how do they label themselves, you might find that among the people who buy oranges, those who label themselves as conservatives outnumber those who label themselves as liberal by 2 to 1. And perhaps the same with apples. And, gasp, yes! even with potatoes. Just how do those wacky liberals feed themselves !?!

Given this, I think a more relevant question is, yes, conservatives can read, but do they understand what they read? :wink: [Just a joke, Sam, you are clearly an intelligent and well informed person, just drop that hat. It doens’t look good on you].

79

Well, I might be inviting even more flames with the following theory, but here goes.

Premise A: There are fundamental differences between conservativism and liberalism which tend to drive conservatives toward consensus and to drive liberals toward ongoing debate.

Support: No matter which definitions one prefers for “liberal” and “conservative”, the approach of liberal political philosophy requires a general first assumption that all cultural, social and political viewpoints must be considered equally valid until tested against available information, and the conservative political philosophy includes a general first assumption that the conventional cultural, social, political viewpoints, having survived such testing over time, must be considered superior until proven differently. Note, by the way that these are the philosophical approaches of liberalism and conservatism. Ideologues of both stripes turn these general assumptions into abosolute givens, or articles of faith, and therefore the liberal ideologue has a dogmatic attachment to the “rightness” of specific products of liberal thought, and therefore resembles the conservative ideologue in all particulars except for political position. But no such attachment to convention exists for most liberals (and no such dogmatic acceptance of status quo exists for most conservatives). This difference in approach leads to a liberal community of thought which entertains constant debate because of an inherent requirement to test concepts –including so called “progressive” concepts- against new information. Conversely, the conservative community of thought justifiably tests all new information against convention, assigning credence or importance to the information based on its conformity with convention, and thereby centering consensus on a clearly established set of precedence.

Premise B: The philosophical bases A tend to reinforce unity of political expression among conservatives and to reinforce variety of expression among liberals.

Support: The ready availability of consensus among conservatives is a strong advantage not only in formation of party platforms, but also in the dissemination of the conservative point of view. There is much less contradiction among conservative pundits because they are all orbiting the same set of conventions.

Premise C: Given the tendency B and fundamental bases A, a majority conservative punditocracy is an inherently static, self-affirming and opposition-denying condition, while a majority liberal punditocracy would be an inherently dynamic, self-critiquing and opposition-inviting condition.

Support: If there is an overarching theme in conservative punditry, it’s that the weight of experience supports established convention. All counterculture, all social change, all economic attention or regulation must breach the rock of convention before it can be respected, and the presumption is not only that the rock will hold, but that contradictory information is either inadequate or liberal “spin”. Liberal pundits, on the other hand, have no rock of convention upon which to mount such a thought fortress; the presumption is that the other guy should be heard, even if he’s carrying the same message you’ve heard before from conservatives.

Discussion: If we accept A, B and C, then clearly it’s quite likely that a largely liberal medium would invite and encourage expressions of conservative thought, while it is equally likely that a largely conservative medium would suppress or discourage expression of liberal thought. However, it is equally likely that a liberal majority of media consumers, if it existed, would tend to produce a market for larger variety in media sources of information, while a conservative set of consumer preferences would narrow the market. Since the market for political expression is becoming more consolidated, particularly in broadcast media, this could indicate either that media consumers are growing less liberal / more conservative, or just that there’s no substantial shift toward liberalism or away from conservatism. The raw effect of this consolidation, though, without doubt, is that there are fewer outlets for liberal expression and that the corresponding increase in conservative expression has reduced the total exposure to political information within the broadcast media, arguably the largest source of political information for American consumers.
Conclusion: Rather than indicating a lack of knowledge/exposure to political ideas among liberals, the growing influence of conservative broadcast media outlets may indicate an overall reduction in such knowledge/exposure among American media consumers as a whole.

[Dennis Miller]
But that’s just my opinion; I could be wrong.
[/Dennis Miller]

80

But to be honest, and this is a shameful admission, I’ve become more disengaged from the news ever since Bush has gotten in office. It’s just really damn depressing, and after the last election, I’ve not been so sure that political engagement really mattered that much.

Yeah, but the freedoms you give up at the ballot box eventually have to be bought back with bullets, if you’re not lucky. The state security apparatus that Ashcroft is building may not be used against Americans generally just yet, but such an apparatus is going to make a tempting target to someone down the line, if Dubya himself doesn’t use it. (I mean, he DID get away with stealing an election, maybe next time he’ll figure he can just take the Presidency by force.)

It’s funny, I’ve always been kinda on the fence about gun control, but thanks to Ashcroft I’m shifting to the right on that one issue.