Changing Minds or Changing Channels?: Partisan News in an Age of Choice

Chicago Studies in American Politics

by Kevin Arceneaux, Martin Johnson

We live in an age of media saturation, where with a few clicks of the remote—or mouse—we can tune in to programming where the facts fit our ideological predispositions. But what are the political consequences of this vast landscape of media choice? Partisan news has been roundly castigated for reinforcing prior beliefs and contributing to the highly polarized political environment we have today, but there is little evidence to support this claim, and much of what we know about the impact of news media come from studies that were conducted at a time when viewers chose from among six channels rather than scores.Through a series of innovative experiments, Kevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson show that such criticism is unfounded. Americans who watch cable news are already polarized, and their exposure to partisan programming of their choice has little influence on their political positions. In fact, the opposite is viewers become more polarized when forced to watch programming that opposes their beliefs. A much more troubling consequence of the ever-expanding media environment, the authors show, is that it has allowed people to tune out the the four top-rated partisan news programs draw a mere three percent of the total number of people watching television.Overturning much of the conventional wisdom, Changing Minds or Changing Channels? demonstrate that the strong effects of media exposure found in past research are simply not applicable in today’s more saturated media landscape.

Genres: Political Science

326 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 1, 2013

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Partisan media is not polarizing America by turning its viewers into extremists. Arceneaux and Johnson conduct a series of innovative experiments measuring the effects of partisan TV. Typical experiments along this line have randomly assigned people to watch Fox News, MSNBC, or a control channel, and then measured their political attitudes. If the partisan viewers hold more extreme attitudes than the control group, this is taken as a sign that partisan media polarizes its viewers. But A&J recognize the flaw in this design--in the real world, many people simply opt out of partisan news, so it never has the chance to affect them. It turns out that the politically uninterested "entertainment seekers" who opt out are the very folks who would be most affected by partisan TV if they did watch it. As such, experiments that force these entertainment seekers to watch Bill O'Reilly tend to over-estimate the effects of partisan news. In A&J's experiments, participants are allowed to change the channel, just as they can in real life--and when they are given this option, the effect of partisan news dramatically decreases.

Of course, this is not to say that partisan media has *no* effect on politics. It may well set the agenda for mainstream news outlets, mislead political elites about public opinion, increase incivility, or provide employment for ne'er-do-well political bloggers. But it's probably not turning your cousin into a right-wing fanatic--he's too busy watching Animal Planet.