Intolerance in the Air
Wanta decided to follow his hunch and look for correlations between our polarized atmosphere and the ways people get their information. With the help of Stephanie Craft, an assistant professor, and Mugur Geana, a graduate student, he reexamined data from a 2003 Pew Research Center survey that had touched on Americans’ convictions and media choices in order to tease out his own conclusions.
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One thing the three of them ran into is a body of opinion that says the whole notion of polarization is overblown. For instance, in a column written last October, Gallup competitor Lou Dobbs reported that most Americans, regardless of party, agree on a lot of the basics: outsourcing and NAFTA are bad, corporations have too much power, universal health care is worth paying higher taxes to get.
Wanta’s suspicions about the Internet are widely held. A long magazine article in last Sunday’s Washington Post presented two women bloggers who occupy realms they themselves call the “right blogosphere” and the “left blogosphere.” Reporter David Von Drehle explained, “Bloggers scan for bits of evidence that fit into their existing views and then generalize from there. . . . The supply of raw material . . . is virtually infinite. The Internet contains billions–trillions?–of discrete tiles of information, from which a diligent network of bloggers can create any mosaic they choose.”
Wanta is intrigued by the nature of radio. “It decays,” he tells me. “You listen to the radio, and ten minutes later you can’t revisit it. It’s done. The Internet, blogs–you can go several times a day and read the same postings over and over again. I have a newspaper on my lap right now, and I could be reading it a couple of hours from now. Radio–it’s there, you listen to it, and it’s gone. A different kind of information processing is involved.”
“ANONYMOUS SOURCES,” shouts the cover of the July Editor & Publisher. “The great debate continues: But is the crackdown going too far?” Not to worry.
Federated clearly wants to go ahead with the name change and is now doing some sort of survey of Field’s customers. But rebranding an old Chicago institution can’t be done by waving a wand. An aggressive marketing campaign will be required, and that will mean hundreds of thousands of extra dollars spent on advertising.
