:eek::eek::eek:
An excellent summary, but too kind in part. The description you have given of “conservatives”, that they select and adjust facts to fit their intellectual constructs, is to me fundamental to the definition of ideologuism. Some go one more step and engage in willful misrepresentation or even manufacturing of “facts” to avoid reconsideration of the structures of their very worldviews.
The approach you have called “liberal”, starting with no preconceptions and leading where the facts take you, is to me fundamental to the definition of intellectual honesty. This point has been made to Brother Samuel repeatedly, I might add.
I do not think there’s a necessary link between ideologuism/honesty to one’s views of the proper extent of government in society, or the desirability of budget-balancing, and so forth. I’d prefer to see the C and L words removed from your story.
The part that follows, about people with active, questioning, curious intellects being less attracted to lowest-denominator bombast on the mass media except for entertainment value, is on target. Just as clearly, active thought that extends over many directions is incompatible with entertainment for the many who would rather engage (even vicariously) in a little easy, self-righteousness-enhancing bashing.
I’m otherwise not responding to the OP because it is patently derived from the definition of “liberal” as simply “non-conservative”. Most of us are moderates, both objectively and by self-description, and do not accept that tight-little-dismissable-box definitions - there’s a whole range of facts and ideas out here.
I have only a little to add, perhaps until Sam responds.
My own news habits include the New York Times on occasion, but I read The Economist and Foreign Affairs religiously.
Given the fractious nature of the progressive movement, there are a profusion of liberal activist organizations, probably dozens nationwide for every conceivable cause. These organizations reach hundreds of thousands or dare I say millions of liberals all over America every single day. I happened to be the membership administrator for one particularly large one in New York, and one of my responsibilities was to send regular digests and policy emails to everyone who had ever supplied his email address to us. I regularly transmitted broadcast emails on political issues to twenty thousand people.
A lot of liberals everywhere subscribe to lists like these. Every major nonprofit allows you to receive their emails for free. Why would I want to watch a ten second pre-digested blurb on CNN when I can read a policy brief replete with facts, numbers, links, and contact information for people I can harass?
Anyone else out there use these briefs as a source of news?
Elvis, everybody has to start any deliberative process from a set of assumptions. It’s not intellectually dishonest to assume that an existing system is superior to other systems which failed to survive competition with it. It may or may not lead to just as intellectually rigorous a process as other assumptions might, but it is no less honest than others either, and if I seem to have implied that conservatives were dishonest or non-rigorous, then I apologize to conservatives!
I agree that dogmatic refusal to consider opposing visions is intellectually dishonest however, whatever the political stripe of the dogmatist.
Great post and cogent amplification, alenar. And I’m a he, fer future reference. 
xenophon41, what I’m calling dishonest is the process of fitting facts to intellectual structures, not the other way around, and, when the facts are in discord with those structures, revising or discounting the facts instead of the hypothesis.
Yes, you have to start with something, but you always have to be open to not ending there. That’s how the ol’ scientific process works, and there’s no reason to do the opposite when considering social policies instead of laws of physics. You do seem to agree, I take it.
Sorry for any lack of clarity.
OK, I composed two messages last evening, but was unable to post them. Here’s the first:
sigh Sam Stone: As jshore and Gaudere pointed out, you really have to normalize your data. What bugs me about this is I would have thought that you would know better, Sam.
Alternatively, you could use a survey of individuals, rather than a survey of media outlets. The former would tell you what different groupings do.
(Furthermore, if you want to understand American political groupings, I would recommend looking at Pew’s (or is it Anneberg?) more detailed breakdown of the American electorate.)
Finally, the top 10 best seller list is but a tiny fraction of total sales, I assume. It is plausible that the (smaller number) of self-identified liberals/progressives read a wider variety of works. I’m not just speaking out of my arse here:
Emphasis added. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/17/business/media/17DEM.html
Look, I realize this sounds like special pleading, but you really have to improve your evidence. (I don’t have problems with the inflammatory bit though).
Ok, that’s the introduction. Admittedly, all of this had been covered earlier and Sam has absorbed it.
…
Ok, I was a little snarly: this information was tougher to dig up than I thought. I finally found a survey of individuals at Pew. They have a biennial news survey.
http://people-press.org/reports/print.php3?ReportID=156
http://people-press.org/reports/print.php3?ReportID=36
I hope to look at their results.
Here’s the second post. Sorry I couldn’t read the today’s posts (yet).
Quotes from 2002 Pew Media Report:
Emphasis added.
Ok. I could only find the ideological results from the 2000 report: Latest data was from October 1999.
In it, 21% of all Americans were self-identified as liberal or very liberal (like flowbark). 33% were either conservative or very conservative.
Now let’s do the math.
A Fox viewer is about 40% more likely to be conservative than your randomly-chosen American (46/33)-1.
A Fox viewer is about 14% less likely to be liberal than your randomly-chosen American (1-(18/21)). (Not Bad)
An O’Reilly viewer is 1.7 times as likely to be conservative and 76% less likely to be liberal. (That’s more like it.)
So conservatives are more likely to watch O’Reilly and liberals are more likely to read the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Magazine. They both watch Fox News.
But that still doesn’t tell us what the typical liberal (or conservative) reads or views. I actually downloaded the 2002 dataset, but couldn’t figure out how to read a *.sav file. Oh well.
I report. You decide. (Or rather, I calculate and you check my math and interpretation).
In order to avoid a hijack, I’ll give a brief answer. You don’t say his main goal is to reduce our civil liberties, but my friend did. It didn’t occur to her that he was trying to protect Americans, but possibly restricting civil liberties in the process.
Lewis’s article was criticized as being one-sided spin, but I cannot recall where I found the criticism. One bit I recall was Lewis’s sentence, “One, Yasser Hamdi, was found under unexplained circumstances on a battlefield in Afghanistan.” In fact, Hamdi was found armed and fighting with the enemy forces on a battlefield in Afghanistan. This detail has key legal significance in the court’s willingness to let him be treated like a POW.
I consider these types of shows to be entertainment only. I don’t think you could consider someone to be educated because they watch O’Reilly Factor or Donahue.
As for the statistics you cite, all of them except 2 are of the type “More people who self-identify as conservative use x as a news source”. Can’t that be explained if we consider that there are simply MORE people who self-identify as conservative? Consider this: More right-handed people read newspapers than left-handed people. Does that mean left-handed people are less informed? No, it just means there are MORE right-handed people in the country.
And as for your other two examples:
I think alenar has already pointed out the error in your interpretation.
And sorry if my post is redundant, but I figure the point can’t really be overemphasized.
Question to dopers: Would you guess that a *.sav file is something from SPSS?
Elvis – yes, I agree.
flowbark: Gadarene, not Gaudere. 
And I don’t remember the .sav extension in my experience with SPSS, but that experience was a few years ago.
I’m sure other packages use that extension, but SPSS does, too.
You know, objective knowledge, the type of knowledge passed on by things like Jeopardy, trumps the ability to parrot one-sided partisan standpoints on political issues on pretty much every level. I’d give thumbs up to a person who watched Jeopardy instead of Rush Limbaugh or any other pundit, regardless of thier position in the left/right spectrum.
Enjoy,
Steven
Interesting statistical analysis of the survey, Gadarene et al. An excellent example of how easy it is to put a spin on things…and we wonder why politicans can fool us.
Okayk I just got back from work, and first off, I’d like to thank everyone for taking the question seriously. The tone of today’s messages is much better. Or maybe I was just tired and cranky last night and reading too much into things.
Gadarene: I get your point about normalizing the data against the population as a whole. But the problem I have with that is that it still doesn’t explain the large industry trends.
Let’s step back a minute and look at voting data, which is pretty evenly split along a right/left axis. I think it’s fair to say that there are about 20-30% of the population who consider themselves on the left, and a similar amount who consider themselves on the right. Call these the Democrat and Republican ideologues - the ‘safe votes’ that can be counted on to vote one way or the other regardless of who is running for elections, etc. The other 40-60% of the people are in the middle, and can be ‘captured’ by candidates of either side if they feel the candidate is especially good or their particular issue is represented best by one side or the other. This is the great ‘undecided’ territory that swings elections.
So starting from this premise, that the ideological balance in the country is roughly equal, you would also expect an equal balance of sales in the commercial media. You would expect an equal number of liberal talk talk shows, talk radio, liberal idea books, etc.
But there isn’t. There’s a vast difference. The book publishing industry is selling overwhelmingly disproportionate numbers of conservative books (non-fiction category considered only, of course). Cable television, which is much more competitive and open than the ‘big three’ networks, is veering sharply to the right - not because the owners of the networks are ideologues, but because liberal programming that is tried dies a horrible death in the marketplace. Conservative magazines and web sites are thriving, while the liberal ones are failing and/or making due with smaller readerships. Etc.
This is the context in which the PEW survey was brought up - as an attempt to explain this discrepancy. PEW surveyed the audiences across all media, and found a disproportionate number of self-identified conservatives as opposed to liberals. Now, it may be that this study is simply reflecting the national average of people who self-indentify that way. But if that’s the case, then there are only two conclusions - one is that self-identification is meaningless, in which case we still have the original question to answer (why do conservative-oriented materials do better in the marketplace?), or people self identify as conservatives in a 2-1 margin over liberals because conservatives actually outnumber liberals by 2-1. If that’s the case, then how do we fit that into the voting data?
One possibility is that the distribution is not normal. Perhaps people who are on the conservative side skew pretty hard to the right, while the Democratic support base is actually made up of people who can be swung in either direction. That would fit the voting data with the disparity in self-selection.
But that still doesn’t explain why the ‘marginally left’ bulk on the left side won’t watch the media. Why did Donahue’s political talk show get slaughtered by O’Reilly’s? Why is Fox in general killing other cable competitors in the ratings? Why aren’t liberal books selling?
It seems we’re still missing a piece of the puzzle, unless we accept the idea that people who trend conservative really are more likely to consume the news media than are people on the left. And frankly, that seems to me to be the best hypothesis so far. Maybe people on the left spend more of their intellectual capital on, say, the arts? That certainly seems to be the case, adn that is supported by the one type of media that looks to have a large liberal audience - the ‘literary’ magazines.
This theory fits in with other societal trends - the preponderance of liberals in arts faculties, and conservatives in poli sci and business faculties. The preponderance of liberals in the artistic community, and the preponderance of conservatives in the financial community.
Does this not make some logical sense? Maybe conservatives as a group ARE more educated on current events, but only because liberals are more educated in other areas.
Another possible theory is that this apparent skewing reflects the relative satisfaction between liberals and conservatives with society in general. I alluded to this in one of my messages last night - Maybe if you’d taken this poll in the 1960’s, when conservatives were in ‘control’ and the liberals were fighting from the outside, you would have seen the opposite.
Oh, I was going to add that one possible conclusion out of this is that liberals could be in for a rough ride. Back when the media was more of an oligarchy, it could be more ‘objective’ (or what it considered to be objective - many of us thought that the big three networks and large newspapers had a pretty strong liberal bias).
But now that the media is becoming more democratized, market forces will push it to the right. The broadcast news magazines like “This Week” are losing huge market share to cable. New newspapers in Los Angeles and New York are springing up with a conservative bent to offset the NY Times and LA Times. The internet is becoming an increasingly powerful news source, and it’s tilting pretty heavily to the right.
If that’s the case, then it may become harder for liberals to get their ideas out. Will this cause America and even the world in general to veer to the right?
Maybe this hypothesis is wrong, but I think it’s a very interesting and potentially powerful trend, which should worry liberals if true.
Sam, cite for your %20-30 core vote base for both liberals and conservatives? In any case, if it were %20 liberal versus %30 conservative, which I think it’s more like anyway, thats a %50 difference there. That alone goes a long way to explain the results of your OP.
xenophon, I agree with everything about your post except:
They are certainly general assumptions, but not the only, or the first or most important, of Liberalism and Conservatism, as understood in the context of this thread.
Absolutely those aren’t the most important or distinctive features of either philosophy! The respective attitudes of liberalism and conservativism toward individual and collective rights, toward social change and toward the proper role of government form the truly important differences. I (somewhat clumsily) offered those general assumptions as the features which I think tend to define the nature of political expression within the two broad communities which leads to a more cohesive message from the conservatives than from the liberals.