THE IMPACT OF POLARIZED MEDIA ON DEMOCRACY

Abstract

Our media landscape is more polarized than ever before, which has serious consequences for the function of our democracy. Views on important political and cultural issues are increasingly transmitted through an ideological lens, which has been shown to significantly skew public opinion. Moreover, non-centrist news sources exacerbate such effects on readers far beyond the stories covered, altering the core set of issues on which people consider. There exist also numerous individual-level implications to consuming news that falls along relatively extreme points of the ideological spectrum including decreased political action, lower trust in political institutions, a turn towards myriad, often extreme, health practices, perceptions of others on the political right as ideological zealots, and a general turn away from the mainstream media. Media distinctly wields the power to influence the democratic process. Theoretical drives that explain how such news production and consumption behavior impact democratic processes are explored. The connection is illuminated through the concept of the democratic process as a marketplace, whereby citizens “purchase” political opinions. Because people lack the time or inclination to do research on every single policy issue, politicians act as information providers in this market and the press as a middleman, shaping the information before it is consumed. However, as with any imperfect market, regulatory measures are necessary to ensure its correct functioning. These include reducing monopoly behavior in the producer side, creating informed consumers, and a guarantee that the quality of goods meet corresponding standards. Where these conditions are not met, the market is unable to act as an efficient distributor of information, which are necessary to democratic opinion formation and therefore policy direction. No matter how good or noble the average citizen, if the information upon which his judgment is based is dominated by relatively polarized media, the democracy will not function well in the end. This theoretical grounding is then elaborated upon through evidence found in both cultural artifacts and experimental scholarly research.