Valdis Krebs’ neat chart showing how people who read books by Joe Conason and people who read books by Ann Coulter don’t tend to overlap much in their choice of reading was a useful reminder of how polarized our political culture has become, and it coursed quickly through the blogosphere when it was first published.
It made the New York Times today. In the accompanying article by Emily Eakin you will read the following:
[Krebs’] finding appears to buttress the argument made by Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago, in his influential study “Republic.com” (Princeton University Press, 2001) that contemporary media and the Internet have abetted a culture of polarization, in which people primarily seek out points of view to which they already subscribe. |
This sounds good until you think for a nanosecond. Yes, Krebs’ chart is a vivid indication that our culture is divided. But it doesn’t offer much help figuring out how we got there. Sure, it’s possible that “contemporary media and the Internet” are at fault, but how does Krebs’ chart buttress that argument? (Note, also, how two very different forces are lumped together in that phrase. “Contemporary media” includes Fox News, which does its share to polarize America; but when it comes to the Internet, I lean more to David Weinberger’s argument, which points out that the Net provides more opportunity for cross-camp dialogue than any other medium, even if we don’t use it as much as we might.)
The logical fallacy in the Times piece is a simple one: Krebs’ chart is about book purchases. Books are wonderful things, but they don’t exactly fit under the rubric of “contemporary media and the Internet.” If we’re blaming media technologies for political polarization based on the Krebs study then we’d better start pointing fingers at the dreaded printing press. Let us restrict the flow of ink! Or, more sensibly, we should stop blaming technology and start looking at the content of our communication. It may be that our readership of books today is polarized because our nation is deeply and fundamentally split about very basic subjects and ideas.
Last night on Fresh Air I heard Terry Gross interview the lunatic Tim LaHaye, author of the appallingly popular “Left Behind” novels about the apocalypse and the end days and the coming of the Antichrist. LaHaye believes I’m going to burn in hell because I don’t believe in his god. It’s very hard for me to think that there is any overlap between his idea of America and mine. But he sells many more books than Salon ever has, or probably will. We’re beyond polarized — we’re living in parallel universes that happen to share the same continent and electoral system.
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