Does Partisan Media Actually Persuade Anyone? – BCB #128
Also, a psychoanalytic take on political discord.
Obviously, some media outlets exist to serve only Red or only Blue. Does this matter for polarization? Two recent papers concerning partisan TV make a pretty clear case: some people watch an awful lot of it, and it does persuade them! As David Broockman, one of the authors of these studies, explains, “partisan TV has a meaningful audience of not-already-highly-polarized viewers who watch it habitually, and who aren't exposed to facts that are unflattering to their side.”
The first study asked who watches partisan TV, which they define as Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. Broockman and his fellow researchers looked at Nielsen data tied to public voter registration data, smart TV data, cable box data, and data from TV diaries. These sources indicate that there are more people watching at least eight hours of partisan TV each month than there are watching local or broadcast news.
Most partisan TV viewers tend to stick to one outlet rather than tuning into several, and generally watch broadcasts that align with their preexisting views. And yet, Broockman also points out:
partisan TV's audience isn't all extreme—weak partisans & Independents watch it, and their opinions aren't hugely different [from each other]. There's room for them to be persuaded.
Ok, so lots of potentially persuadable people watch partisan TV. Are they actually persuaded? In the second study, Broockman and his colleagues recruited avowed Fox viewers to instead watch CNN for a month. While these viewers remained staunchly conservative afterwards, they did emerge from the experiment with slightly shifted beliefs. For example they were:
more likely to agree that if Trump made a mistake, Fox News would not cover it
less likely to believe that Democrats were trying to steal the 2020 election with fraudulent mail-in ballots and more likely to support voting by mail;
generally more critical in their evaluations of Trump and Republican politicians.
These shifts were on the order of 0.2 standard deviations, which is considered a “small” effect size by social science standards, but much larger than the typical effect of political advertising.
That said, just because participants became less enchanted with Fox and Trump doesn’t mean they started to view CNN and Biden more favorably. And two months after the experiment ended, these Fox viewers’ opinions and TV watching habits were right back where they were at the beginning. But Broockman still sees hope in the results:
Even among the most orthodox partisans and partisan media viewers… those who receive a sustained diet of information that helps them see the bigger picture actually are open-minded enough to understand that their side isn’t doing a perfect job, either.
One might assume similar results if viewers switched from CNN to Fox (or perhaps MSNBC to CNN). We reached out to Broockman asking why he didn’t study this direction at the time, and he said it was due to funding constraints (participants were paid $15 an hour to watch CNN).
But what about the Internet?
Of course, partisan news isn’t limited to TV. A new study from Pew finds one in five Americans regularly get news from news influencers on sites like X, Instagram, and YouTube. Among adults under 30 that number is even higher. This is true of both Republican and Democrat consumers, though slightly more news influencers explicitly identify as Red rather than Blue (27 percent compared to 21 percent).
The Pew study also found that 30 percent of people looking at news influencer content mostly agree with what they see and only 2 percent mostly disagree. The majority said they see an even mix of opinions they do and don’t agree with.
Given the evident ubiquity of partisan news influencers, it would be useful to have a study similar to the experiment with CNN and Fox which shows how shifting between Red and Blue social accounts media shifts political attitudes. We couldn’t find such a study, but in the meantime, we’re learning more about how untrustworthy information spreads online, and how it’s linked to partisanship. As another new paper finds:
Compared with trustworthy news sources, posts from misinformation sources evoked more angry reactions and outrage than happy or sad sentiments. Users were motivated to reshare content that evoked outrage and shared it without reading it first to discern accuracy. Interventions that solely emphasize sharing accurately may fail to curb misinformation because users may share outrageous, inaccurate content to signal their moral positions or loyalty to political groups.
This is bad. But here’s the thing: it seems as though the solution may be just as obvious as the problem. Just as Broockman and his colleagues found that diehard conservatives adjust their views after just a month of exposure to the other side, other research indicates that unfollowing hyper-partisan influencers improves people’s feelings toward the out-party—and leads people to engage more with reliable, accurate news. A few small tweaks to how we consume news can make a world of difference.
A psychoanalytic approach to mending our political divide
In a recent column, psychoanalyst and host of the TV show “Couples Therapy” Orna Guralnik applies the language and theory underpinning her work to illustrate how people’s polarized political disagreements bear a striking resemblance to the fights that she often sees taking place between couples. As psychoanalysts see it, she explains:
early in our psychological development, we all resort to a defense mechanism identified by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein as “splitting.” To cope with negative or inexplicable experiences, we divide our perceptions of people into either all-good or all-bad.
This splitting allows us to avoid dealing with feelings of vulnerability, shame, hate, ambivalence or anxiety by externalizing (or dumping) unwanted emotions onto others. We then feel free to categorize these others as entirely negative, while seeing ourselves as good.
In political environments, this kind of splitting manifests in an “us versus them” mentality — where “our” side is virtuous and correct, and “their” side is wrong and flawed — which produces the kind of rigid, extreme, ideological warring we are caught up in now.
Technology, she adds, only makes this worse by creating bubbles that make it harder to engage with the other side—and easier to demonize these unseen others. Opposing arguments and the people who hold them start to seem like an existential threat (sound familiar?), a posture psychoanalysts would call “the paranoid-schizoid position.” Nuance becomes harder and harder to accommodate.
According to Klein, the phase after this one is known as the “depressive position.” At this point, Guralnik writes, “individuals begin to see themselves and others as complex and multifaceted, capable of both positive and negative qualities.” This can be a pivotal moment for couples trying to repair their relationships. For Americans to get to this place, she goes on, they must fundamentally reframe how they see their political opponents—and themselves:
To understand that Democrats and Republicans share more than they are acknowledging, you first have to recognize your own role in perpetuating conflict and harm. Selfishness and a wish to protect those closest to us are human qualities we all share and need to grapple with. But I also believe that most of us can find within ourselves the wish to protect the vulnerable, the earth and its biosphere, the wish for a fair distribution of resources and the basic abhorrence of murderous and genocidal impulses, even if we have very different ideas of what actions these beliefs translate into…
What the psychoanalytic lens offers is a way to address the underlying patterns in which we process our disagreements. We can mourn that which we cannot change, rather than nurse our grievances. And in working toward worthy policy goals, we can avoid getting stuck in endless cycles of treating those who disagree with us as inferior, hostile or dangerous.
Understanding yours and your opponent’s differences is a key step to moving from “us versus them” to “them are us,” whether you’re in couples therapy or navigating national politics.
Quote of the Week
It’s easy to regard our political allies as our equals. But this requirement applies also to those citizens whom we could as our political adversaries. They are our political equals, too.
A great lens of perspective to help move our political needle of judgment into a more reasonable place.