FAIR

Sep172015

Corporate Press Fails to Trump Bigotry

by Chip Berlet

Depiction of Donald Trump in the LA Times, which described the candidate as “polarizing.” (photo: Robert Gauthier / LAT)

The outlandish rhetoric of Republican presidential wildcard Donald Trump has left many journalists at a loss for words—words such as bigotry, xenophobia, racism, sexism and demagoguery.

Some media outlets raised these issues. Yet many reporters (or perhaps their editors) still seem reluctant to move past the aphasic and simplistic sports-reporting model, in which ideological content analysis is renounced.

An example of a typical article is the piece on Trump’s stump speech by Michael Finnegan and Kurtis Lee in the Los Angeles Times (9/15/15). It is well-written, colorful and even includes the obligatory single sentence from an anti-Trump protester. Yet there is little serious political or historic context.

One line does note that Trump borrowed from “Richard Nixon’s polarizing pledge to stand up for the ‘silent majority’ amid the social upheaval of the 1960s.” Nixon’s speech, however, concerned support for the Vietnam War. A more apt comparison would have been Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” to garner votes from white voters (The Nation, 11/13/12).

Journalists and scholars familiar with the rise of contemporary right-wing populist political parties and social movements in Europe, however, recognize that xenophobic, anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric can lead to acts of violence.

For several years, I have had editors tell me that the contention that right-wing rhetoric can lead to violence is a liberal myth. Right-wing media pundits certainly reject this claim. Yet this is a well-studied chain of events, analyzed by scholars since the rise of fascism in Europe following World War I and the Nazi genocide during World War II. So I wrote a survey of the scholarship as a book chapter titled “Heroes Know Which Villains to Kill: How Coded Rhetoric Incites Scripted Violence.” In it, I summarized the consensus:

The leaders of organized political or social movements sometimes tell their followers that a specific group of “Others” is plotting to destroy civilized society. History tells us that if this message is repeated vividly enough, loudly enough, often enough, and long enough—it is only a matter of time before the bodies from the named scapegoated groups start to turn up.

Freedom of speech is not the issue. A free and open debate is a necessity for democracy. Trump therefore is not legally culpable for any acts of violence against his named scapegoats. Trump should be held accountable on a moral basis by the media for his using the tools of fear, such as demonization and scapegoating, that put real people at risk for attacks.

Photo from a Nation piece on Trump, which noted the “xenophobia at the heart of Trump’s campaign.” (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

The progressive press has done a better job of pointing out this ugly potential. Writing for TheNation (9/14/15), Julianne Hing argued, “It’s clear that the xenophobia at the core of Trump’s campaign is resonating, and his antics are already echoing beyond the campaign trail into both culture and policy.” Hing quotes Mario Carrillo of the immigrant rights group United We Dream as saying Trump’s “rhetoric is leading to real-life consequences.”

Many instances of physical attacks are chronicled in Hing’s article, although motivation is usually unclear. One pair of attackers did tell police they were directly influenced by Trump’s rhetoric, according to the Associated Press (9/3/15). Trump said he does not condone violence. Nonetheless, immigrant rights activists worry violence will increase.

Adele Stan in the American Prospect (9/9/15) put it boldly:

What Trump is doing, via the media circus of which he has appointed himself ringmaster, is making the articulation of the basest bigotry acceptable in mainstream outlets, amplifying the many oppressive tropes and stereotypes of race and gender that already exist in more than adequate abundance.

The headline for Evan Horowitz’s piece in the Boston Globe (8/19/15) claims “Donald Trump Blazes a European Path in American Politics,” and Horowitz asks, “Does Donald Trump represent the emergence of a new force in American politics, a right-populist movement that could reorganize the American” political spectrum? Missing is the fact that, from President Andrew Jackson in the early 1800s through George Wallace in the 1970s to Pat Buchanan, there have been right-wing populist movements in the United States. It is not a European import.

Part of this confusion over Trump is definitional: Scholars write entire books trying to map out the contours of right-wing political and social movements, especially the line dividing right-wing populism and neofascism. The pre-eminent scholar in this area, University of Georgia’s Cas Mudde, explained in the Washington Post (8/26/15):

The key features of the populist radical right ideology – nativism, authoritarianism, and populism – are not unrelated to mainstream ideologies and mass attitudes. In fact, they are best seen as a radicalization of mainstream values.

For many scholars, right-wing populism is classified as part of the “radical right,” while the term “extreme right” is reserved for insurgent groups seeking to overturn the constitutional order.

In his book Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe, Mudde lists as common “extreme right” features nationalism, racism, xenophobia, anti-democracy and the strong state, including a law-and-order approach.

In his Ideology of the Extreme Right, Mudde wrote:

The terms neo-Nazism and to a lesser extent neo-fascism are now used exclusively for parties and groups that explicitly state a desire to restore the Third Reich (in the case of neo-fascism the Italian Social Republic) or quote historical National Socialism (fascism) as their ideological influence.

That’s not Trump. His ideology and rhetoric are much more comparable to the European populist radical right, akin to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, the Danish People’s Party or Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. All of them use the common radical right rhetoric of nativism, authoritarianism and populism.

Salon‘s headline on Trump: He’s not, actually.

“Donald Trump Is an Actual Fascist” trumpets the headline in Salon (7/25/15) for Conor Lynch’s confused and badly researched article on Trump. Ignoring the current rise of xenophobic neo-fascist groups in Europe, Lynch tells us that “fascism died in the mid-20th century.”

Undermining Salon’s headline, Lynch tells us the “GOP are obviously not fascists, but they share a family resemblance.” The resemblance, according to Lynch, is explained in the famous quote attributed to Italy’s fascist dictator during World War II, Benito Mussolini:

Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.

According to Lynch, this “definition may very well fit the GOP ideology: a kind of corporate fascism.” Alas, the quote is a hoax, widely circulated on the internet butdebunked years ago. Mussolini never wrote or said anything like that, since the fake statement refutes Mussolini’s views on fascism.

More complicated is the detailed and erudite polemic in Truthout (9/15/15) by Henry A. Giroux, expanded from Tikkun (9/9/15). In “Political Frauds and the Ghost of Totalitarianism,” Giroux invokes the theories of world-famous philosopher Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism. He warns that widespread civic illiteracy in the US population is more than the media manufacturing “ignorance on an individual scale”; it is, in fact

producing a nationwide crisis of agency, memory and thinking itself…a kind of ideological sandstorm in which reason gives way to emotion, and a willful limitation on critical thought spreads through the culture as part of a political project that both infantilizes and depoliticizes the general public.

According to Giroux, “Donald Trump is not the singular clown who has injected bizarre and laughable notions into US politics; he is the canary in the mineshaft warning us that totalitarianism relies on mass support and feeds on hate, moral panics” and what Arendt called the “the frenzied lawfulness of ideological certitude.”

Xenophobic cartoon, 1899.

Yet long before the appearance of totalitarianism in the modern era, the United States saw mass movements that used force to subjugate or purge the degraded and demonized “Other.” As a nation, we enforced white Christian nationalism through the genocide of indigenous peoples and the enslavement and mass murder of black people for profit. For many decades, immigrants including those who were Irish, Italian, Polish or Russian were second-class citizens, not considered “white.” Women had few rights and were treated as the property of their fathers, then their husbands. Jews were perpetual outsiders. People with unpopular religious views were shunned and in some instances killed. Chinese were excluded, Japanese were interned in camps. Nativist racism periodically has cut a bloody gash through our body politic, without reliance on totalitarianism.

Trump is not an example of creeping totalitarianism; he is the white man growing hoarse with bigoted canards while riding at the forefront of a new nativist movement. Adele Stan bluntly suggests that to “ask if the rogue Republican’s surge is good for Democrats is the wrong question.” Instead, we need to ask what is wrong with America, “that this racist, misogynist, money-cheating clown should be the frontrunner for the presidential nomination of one of its two major parties?”

Trump feeds the resentment felt by many people who are white, male, straight or Christian who feel displaced by “Others” taking over “their” nation. These people see themselves as the real producers of value in the United States, and consider the disparaged “Others” to be parasites. Thus the 2012 campaign of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was built around the clandestine theme of mobilizing the “makers” against the “takers,” as reported by Eric Schulzke in the Deseret News(9/19/12). This is called “producerism” by scholars, and it is a central element of right-wing populism in the United States.

What fuels this sort of bitter backlash movement now? The late scholar Jean Hardisty of Political Research Associates argued in 1995 that a confluence of several historic factors has assisted the success of the right in the United States:

• a conservative religious revitalization,
• economic contraction and restructuring,
• race resentment and bigotry,
• backlash and social stress, and
• a well-funded network of right-wing organizations.

“Each of these conditions has existed at previous times in US history,” wrote Hardisty:

While they usually overlap to some extent, they also can be seen as distinct, identifiable phenomenon. The lightning speed of the right’s rise can be explained by the simultaneous existence of all five factors. Further, in this period they not only overlap, but reinforce each other. This mutual reinforcement accounts for the exceptional force of the current rightward swing.

Scholars Michael Omi and Howard Winant, in Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, suggest that this set of circumstances makes many Americans fear the end of the “American Dream.” This backlash is picking up speed. The Republican voter base in the Tea Party long ago shifted its attention away from fiscal restraint toward anti-immigrant xenophobia, banning abortion and pushing gay people back into the closet.

Many scholars of fascism and neofascism now suggest right-wing populism can metamorphosize into these fascistic totalitarian forms, but they recognize that it seldom does–and that fascist movements seldom gain state power. Yet the demonization and scapegoating that accompanies right-wing populism in the United States is breeding a counter-subversion panic targeting immigrants, Mexicans, Muslims, feminists, gay people, liberals and leftists. Planned Parenthood has become a special target to appeal to the Christian Right.

Authoritarian, xenophobic nativism is not a European import in the United States.

While racism is not confined to the American South, a recent study by sociologists Rory McVeigh and David Cunningham, described onBrandeis Now (12/4/14), found that a significant predictor of current Republican voting patterns in the South is the prior existence of a strong chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in the area in the 1960s. McVeigh writes on the London School of Economics website (12/17/14) that although “populist politics appealed to many Southern voters in earlier times, the Southern Democratic Party was also a key instrument in the defense of white privilege and racial oppression.”

The passage of federal Civil Rights Act in 1964 propelled many Democratic Party “Dixiecrats” into the Republican Party, where they now appear at campaign rallies in freebie “gimme hats” touting Monsanto, Koch brothers fertilizers and Coors beer. They choose racial privilege over economic security. That’s What’s the Matter With Kansas. Now this mass base cheers Trump on while he is Mobilizing Resentment–the title of Hardisty’s 1999 book about the rise of right-wing politics in the US.

McVeigh argues that it is shifts in power dynamics and hierarchies in economic, political and social spheres that launch the processes in which radical right-wing groups attract members, and sometimes a mass base large enough to intrude into the larger society. Using as his analytical example the Klan in the 1920s, McVeigh demonstrates that the right-wing KKK in the 1920s was composed of white people attempting to defend their relatively more privileged position in the social, political and economic life of their communities (E-Extreme, 2-3/10).

According to McVeigh, in his book The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan: Right-Wing Movements and National Politics, “the Klan can best be understood as a response to devaluation in the economic, political and status-based ‘purchasing power’ of the movement’s constituents.” McVeigh adds that “right-wing movements often provide individuals with an effective vehicle for preserving status-based interests as well as political and economic interests.”

During the 1920s, millions of Americans joined the Klan, turning it into a major electoral force in several states with an important role in national politics. The tropes of racial threats posed by people of color as rapists and murderers were glued to the American psyche even before decades of stories planted by Klan organizers in their stump speeches for membership, notes Gerald Horne of the University of Houston, whom I interviewed for the Washington Spectator (8/1/15) after Dylann Roof allegedly murdered nine black people in a historic Charleston, South Carolina, church. Roof told a participant in a Bible study: “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country…and you have to go.”

In covering the story, the New York Times (6/22/15) invented a cowardly phrase, “white primacy,” to describe the blatantly white supremacist group, the Council of Conservative Citizens, where Dylann Roof apparently learned this storyline.

On the day of the Republican candidates debate, the New York Times (9/16/15) burnished Trump’s rising star, declaring that Trump was starting to:

conform to some of the demands of a presidential race, making him, in some ways, more of a typical politician. It suggests that, as much as the Republican electorate is becoming more comfortable with the idea of Mr. Trump as its standard-bearer, he is embracing the rituals and expectations of the role, too.

The Trump candidacy and the shooting in Charleston are connected thematically by a mobilization to defend white nationalism while the racial and ethnic face of America changes hue. The populist right and the extreme right fuel each other. The more we as a nation ignore this process of nativist demonization, the more targets will be painted on the backs of our neighbors. History will record how long these right-wing backlash movements will spread their virulent rhetorical venom in our nation. But as Arendt observed, history judges us as individuals as to whether or not we stood up and spoke out against the banality of evil.

---

Chip Berlet has written about bigotry for over 40 years, much of it while an analyst at Political Research Associates. He is co-author with Matthew N. Lyons of Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort and has published scholarly articles on the dynamics of right-wing populism, fascism and totalitarianism. Additional resources for this article are at http://www.researchforprogress.us/jump/fair2015.html .

EgbertoWillies.com

This Bernie Sanders interview proves mainstream media is the ward of the Military Industrial Complex (VIDEO)

Bernie Sanders handled the spokeswoman of the military industrial complex very well

This Bernie Sanders interview proves mainstream... by ewillies

Senator Bernie Sanders was interviewed by a ward of the military industrial complex and excelled with the appropriate answers. It will only get worse.

Martha Raddatz was on a mission. On the day where new poll numbers were released that showed Bernie Sanders credibly catching on in Iowa, it was evident that he has to be taken even more seriously. It is not enough for other candidates and political operatives to disparage Bernie Sanders. It is time that ‘journalists’ under the direction of the military industrial complex get involved.

Raddatz questions were no longer conversational. Her attempt with her leading questions were to be confrontational. Bernie Sanders kept his composure and answered them all effectively. He explained that his votes against both Iraq wars were correct.

Most countries in the world were united against Iraq each time and as such Iraq would have eventually succumbed to the pressure. That would have saved hundreds of thousands of human lives and trillions of dollars that could have otherwise been invested in the nation’s education and infrastructure. The country’s monies would have been distributed across the nation instead of to the few who profit from the military industrial complex.

Bernie’s answers were too correct. Raddatz had to attempt the condescending attack that implies Sanders was a weak pacifist dove. “Can you imagine Iran or Russia signing some sort of agreement in the future given your record on your reluctance to use force,” Martha Raddatz asked. “Because there is always that threat of force. But they may look at you and say ‘Bernie Sanders wouldn’t do anything about this’.”

The sly smirk on Bernie Sanders face as he got the gist of the question was evident. He understood exactly what was going on. He knew the military industrial complex’s narrative was at work in Raddatz’s question. His answer was simple. “I think they would be making a very very big mistake,” Sanders responded. “I believe the United States should have the strongest military in the world. We should be working with other countries in coalition. And when people threaten the United States, or threaten our allies, or commit genocide, the United States with other countries should be prepared to act militarily.”

Bernie Sanders then reminded Raddatz that our choices for war even in recent history has proven to be wrong. It had destabilized the world.

Raddatz then tried to create a rift between President Obama and Sanders by asking if he supported the drone program given his recent votes. He gave an answer right down the middle. In effect he will support it where it works and would not where it would cause more harm.

The video clip is an example of how the corporate media influenced by the military industrial complex attempt to inject themselves into the body politic in order to effect a particular outcome. They must be called out every single time.

FILED UNDER: GENERALTAGGED WITH: BERNIE SANDERS, MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

SALON


MONDAY, MAR 9, 2015 01:15 PM EDT

The vast right-wing conspiracy is still real. Also, the media is really stupid

Fake scandals consume the news cycle. The real scandals go uncovered and unremarked. Our press is officially a joke

STEVE ALMOND

TOPICS: HILLARY CLINTON, EMAILS, BENGHAZI, RAY RICE, MONICA LEWINSKY, BILL CLINTON, MARK SANFORD,MEDIA CRITICISM, BILL O'REILLY, FOX NEWS, EDITOR'S PICKS, INNOVATION NEWS, BUSINESS NEWS, NEWS,POLITICS NEWS

Bill O'Reilly, Hillary Clinton, Tom Brady (Credit: AP/Kathy Willens/Carolyn Kaster/Elise Amendola/Photo montage by Salon)

Let me start by admitting, upfront, how truly fucking boring I find the Hillary Clinton e-mail story. Not only is it unclear whether the former Secretary of State and future presidential candidate did anything illegal, but the fact that she’s willing to turn her emails over to the State Department casts doubt on the Republican fever dream that her now-infamous private in-box will contain mash notes from foreign donors to her husband’s foundation, or explicit instructions to her underlings to shred vital documents related to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya.

It’s not a non-story, exactly. It’s more like a fishing expedition, a la Whitewater andTravelgate and the Clinton Christmas card list.

The primary motive of such stories isn’t really to root out genuine instances of moral turpitude. It’s to retail a narrative of insinuation that sells newspapers and baits clicks, one that the press has been working for three decades solid when it comes to the Clintons.

Emailgate (as it will surely be dubbed) is a story that arises from confirmation bias—without the confirmation of wrongdoing. Because the media have portrayed the Clintons as slippery and secretive for so many years—masters of the massive cover-up!—we should all assume that Hillary doing business on her private email is slippery and secretive and evidence of some massive cover-up.

But if you look at the history of the Clinton scandals, none of them, other than the Lewinsky nonsense, ever amounted to a hill of beans. All they did was prove to American news consumers (and to Hillary in particular) that the media really were engaged in a “vast, right-wing conspiracy” to take her family down.

Which might be part of why she wanted her email on a private, secured system.

You think?

What the Hillary email kerfuffle demonstrates more broadly is the warped filter our Fourth Estate uses in making editorial decisions.

After all, if reporters wanted to critique Hillary Clinton’s record as Secretary of State—something they should be doing, given her ambitions—they would do well to …critique her record as Secretary of State. They might look at the chaotic state of Libya, for instance, whose “liberation” Clinton helped engineer. They might scrutinize the policies she advocated in Syria and Egypt. They might, in other words, offer some perspective on how Clinton views the world and America’s role in it.

These issues, however, are complex and nuanced. They require a grasp of our diplomatic and military aims in several countries, the extent to which Clinton shaped those aims, the nature of our involvement in those countries, and the results of that involvement.

That’s not easy reporting. It takes time and money and patience. And it relies on a rather earnest conception of the “public interest,” (i.e. that citizens actually want to know how Hillary Clinton views the world and America’s role in it).

It’s much easier, of course, to produce stories that fit into the ready-made scandal template, which consists of:

a.) The dogged (and sometimes paranoid) pursuit of a smoking gun that will justify all the journalistic insinuation, or;

b.) Some private transgression, usually sexual in nature.

Nearly every major political story of the past decade falls into one of these two categories, from Obama’s birth certificate to Solyndra to the IRS farrago, from Monica Lewinsky to Mark Sanford to Anthony Weiner.

Week after week, reporters at major news outlets serve up these lurid morsels, and the usual Greek chorus of cable TV pundits and political handicappers chew them over for as long as the flavor lasts.

What’s at stake in these stories is almost never the morality of the policies enacted by our elected or appointed leaders. It’s ratings, pure and simple.

We’ve reached a point where traditional journalism is being steadily squeezed out by the toxic amorality of scandalism.

For an especially disheartening example of this paradigm in action, consider the hue and cry over Bill O’Reilly’s serial exaggerations concerning his derring do as a reporter.

By all indications, the media believes that the boastful lies he told decades ago to make himself seem brave are more important than the glaring deceits he peddles every night on his show.

But just imagine if reporters focused on those, rather than leaving Jon Stewart to do the dirty work?

Ditto the sad saga of Brian Williams. The NBC anchor carried the Pentagon’s water for years when it came to our disastrous adventure in Iraq. But his journalistic credibility only came under fire when he lied about his helicopter coming under fire in the field.

Or consider the coverage of the NFL’s woes this past season. For nearly a month, reporters whipped themselves into a froth over the off-the-field transgressions of two star running backs, Ray Rice, who knocked his wife unconscious in an elevator, and Adrian Peterson, who was indicted on child injury charges for disciplining his four-year-old son.

On the very same day that the Peterson story broke, a report surfaced revealing that the NFL’s own actuaries estimated that 30 percent of former players would suffer long-term cognitive ailments (i.e. nearly a third of the employees in America’s most famous workplace could expect to face brain damage).

This was shocking news, especially in light of the league’s longstanding efforts to deny, or obscure, the link between football and brain trauma.

And yet the vast majority of the ensuing coverage focused on what sort of punishment Rice and Peterson should or would receive, and whether NFL commissioner Roger Goodell had handled the scandals properly.

This is what scandalism does: it reduces the public discourse to a giant gossip session. It focuses our collective attention on the wrong questions.

It may turn out that Hillary Clinton wanted a private email system so she could hide nefarious deeds. But it’s much more likely that this “scandal” will turn out to be more sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The beauty of scandalism, from a business perspective anyway, is that scandal stories don’t have to lead to a revelation of corruption to be considered successful. They don’t have to deliver on their promise, so long as the pitch is seductive enough to dominate the news cycle.

To use an analogy more appropriate to the milieu: scandalism is the journalistic equivalent of spam.

Trends: Demographics and Political Views of News Audiences

U.S. Politics & Policy

IN CHANGING NEWS LANDSCAPE, EVEN TELEVISION IS VULNERABLE

Section 4: Demographics and Political Views of News Audiences

In general, the regular audiences for most television and print news outlets tend to be older than the public as a whole. Yet there are some notable exceptions. As was the case two years ago, The Colbert Report and The Daily Show have the youngest audiences of the 24 news sources tested: 43% of Colbert’s regular audience is younger than 30, as is 39% of the Daily Show’s regular viewers. Just 23% of the public is 18-to-29.

Regular readers of the New York Times also tend to be younger than average. Nearly a third (32%) of regular Times readers – are younger than 30.

In contrast, political talk shows, particularly conservative talk programs, have older audiences. Large majorities of the regular viewers of Sean Hannity (66%) and The O’ Reilly Factor (64%) are 50 and older. Just 43% of all Americans are 50 and older. And while just 17% of the public is 65 and older, 42% of regular Hannity viewers and 40% of regular O’Reilly viewers are in that age category.

Liberal talk show audiences also skew older, but not as dramatically. Still, among regular Hardball watchers, 59% are 50 or older, and 28% are at least 65. Among regular Rachel Maddow viewers, 57% are 50 or older and 25% are at least 65.

Men dominate the regular audiences of the financial publications included in the survey: 73% of the regular readers of the Economist and Bloomberg Businessweek are men as are 71% of regular Wall Street Journal readers.

Men also comprise smaller majorities of the regular audiences for several other news outlets, including Rush Limbaugh listeners (59%), viewers of Colbert (58%) and the Daily Show (56%), as well as regular viewers of Hannity (57%) and O’Reilly (56%).

In contrast, women make up nearly three-quarters (73%) of the regular audience for daytime talk shows, such as The View or the Ellen DeGeneres Show.

The regular viewers of MSNBC also are mostly women (62%). By comparison, the regular audiences for both CNN and Fox News are more evenly divided between women and men.

Many regular news audiences have more education than the general public. And in general, regular readers of newspapers and magazines are more educated than the audiences of television shows or networks.

Nearly two-thirds (64%) of the regular readers of magazines such as the New Yorker, the Atlantic and Harpers are college graduates, as are 63% of readers of the Economist and Bloomberg Businessweek. More than half of the regular readers of the Wall Street Journal (56%), New York Times (56%) and news magazines (53%) also are college graduates. NPR’s audience also is relatively well educated (54% are college graduates). Just 29% of all Americans are college graduates.

By comparison, 29% of CNN’s regular audience, 26% of MSNBC’s audience and 24% of Fox News’s regular audience completed college.

Regular viewers of daytime talk shows are less educated than the public as a whole. Among this group, just 19% have four year degrees, 26% have attended some college and 54% have a high school diploma or less education.

There is a similar pattern when it comes to the family incomes of regular news audiences. At least four-in-ten regular readers of magazines such as the Economist (46%) or the New Yorker (41%), as well as regular NPR listeners (43%), have family incomes of $75,000 or more. Among the public, just 26% have family incomes of $75,000 or more.

Other high earners include readers of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times—38% of each group has a family income of at least $75,000—and Daily Show and Maddow viewers (37% each).

The income distribution of many audiences comes close to matching that of the general public, including audiences of show such as the O’Reilly Factor and Hardball, USA Today and network evening news. The income profiles of all three major cable news network audiences also closely track the general public.

Daytime talk show watchers stand out as the least well off regular audience. About half (51%) have family incomes of less than $30,000, while three-in-ten have $30,000-$74,999 incomes. Just 12% have incomes of $75,000 or more.

News Audiences’ Political Views

Since 2010, there has been little change in the ideological views or partisan leanings of news audiences. The regular audiences for Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly continue to be dominated by conservatives: About seven-in-ten or more of each of these audiences describe their political views as conservative, compared with 35% of the general public. And while Republicans comprise just 24% of the public, they make up half or more of the regular audiences of these three news outlets.

On the other hand, the regular viewers of Rachel Maddow are mostly liberal (57%); this is the only news audience tested in which liberals make up a majority. Just 22% of Americans are liberals. Liberals also make up 48% of regular viewers of Hardball, 43% of Daily Show viewers and 40% of Colbert viewers.

Majorities of the Maddow (74%) and Hardball audiences (65%) are Democrats, as are more than half of regular MSNBC viewers (58%) and regular readers of the New Yorker and similar magazines (57%). Among the public, just 32% are Democrats.

Yet the regular audiences for a number of news sources differ only modestly from the public ideologically or politically. Many of the most popular news sources—network evening news, daily newspapers and morning news, for example—have audiences whose partisan and ideological breakdowns are fairly similar to the public’s. This also is the case for the regular audiences for Sunday morning news shows, business magazines, and both USA Today and the Wall Street Journal.

Attitudes about the News

A majority of Americans (55%) say they trust a few news sources more than others; fewer (42%) say the news media “are pretty much the same.” These opinions have changed very little since 2004. For the most part, regular news audiences are more likely than the public to say they trust a few news sources more than others.

Fully eight-in-ten readers of magazines such as the New Yorker, Atlantic and Harpers, and Hannity, Maddow and O’Reilly viewers say there are a few sources they trust more than others. By contrast, just half of regular viewers of daytime talk shows trust some news sources more than others; nearly as many (45%) say the media are pretty much the same.

A majority of the public (64%) also continues to prefer to get political news from sources that have no particular political point of view; just 26% prefer news from sources that share their political views. Majorities of most news audiences say they want news with no political point of view, including seven-in-ten or more Colbert and Daily Show viewers, Economist readers, NPR listeners and readers of the New Yorker and similar magazines.

However, only about four-in-ten viewers of Hardball (37%), Hannity (41%), Maddow (43%) and listeners of Limbaugh (44%) say they prefer to get news from sources that don’t have a particular political point of view.

Political Knowledge

The public was asked four questions to measure knowledge of political news and current events. The questions concern which party controls the House of Representatives, the currentunemployment rate, the nation that Angela Merkel leads and which presidential candidate favors taxing higher-income Americans. Overall, just 14% of the public got all four questions right. Slightly more people (17%) got all four wrong. Most news audiences, however, scored substantially better than the public.

Almost four-in-ten of Rachel Maddow’s audience (38%) answered the four questions correctly, as did 36% of readers of magazines such as the New Yorker and 34% of Wall Street Journal readers. Audiences for several other news outlets, including NPR (33% all four correct), the Daily Show (32%), Hardball (32%) and the New York Times (31%) fared nearly as well.

The daytime talk show audience fared poorly on the knowledge questions, with just 4% answering all four correctly. Among this group, 18% answered none of the questions correctly.

Slightly more than half the public (54%) knew that the Republican Party controls the House of Representatives. The percentage is down substantially from 2010, when 70% knew the Democrats controlled the House. This decline is reflected across most news audiences.

About half the public (52%) also knew that the national unemployment rate is about 8%. Almost all regular audiences were at least as likely as the general public to get this question right.

Just 22% of the public identified Germany as the country that Angela Merkel leads. Many audiences fared somewhat better on this question than the public as a whole, but most regular readers, viewers and listeners did not know this or offered no response.

Two-thirds of the public knew that Barack Obama—not Mitt Romney—is more supportive of increasing taxes on higher-income people. Majorities of all news audiences answered this question correctly.

Pagination

Trends: News Attitudes and Habits

U.S. Politics & Policy

IN CHANGING NEWS LANDSCAPE, EVEN TELEVISION IS VULNERABLE

Section 3: News Attitudes and Habits

Most Americans continue to say they enjoy following the news. But the percentage saying they enjoy it “a lot,” while little changed since 2010, is significantly lower today than it was four years ago. Currently, 43% say they enjoy following the news a lot. That compares with 45% two years ago and 52% in 2008, 2006 and 2004.

Since 2008, there have been steep declines in the percentages of young people and liberal Democrats who say they enjoy following the news a lot.

Currently, just 24% of those younger than 30 say they enjoy following the news a lot, down 14 points from 2008. There has been less change among older age groups, who continue to be more likely to say they enjoy following the news a lot.

Far fewer liberal Democrats get a great deal of enjoyment from following the news than did so four years ago, during the previous presidential campaign. Just 45% of liberal Democrats say they enjoy following the news a lot; that is unchanged since 2010, but down sharply from 67% in 2008.

Half of conservative Republicans say they enjoy keeping up with the news a lot. That is down from 57% in 2010 and 56% in 2008. There has also been a decline in enjoyment of the news among independents, from 45% in 2008 and 43% in 2010, to 38% now.

As previous news consumption surveys have found, people who enjoy following the news tend to get more news from a variety of sources. Fully 71% of those who enjoy following the news a lot watched television news yesterday, compared with just 41% of those who get less enjoyment from keeping up. And newspaper reading is much higher among those who enjoy keeping up with the news a lot than among those who do not (44% vs. 17%).

People who enjoy following the news a lot also are more likely than those who enjoy it less to get news online (45% vs. 31%). But the difference is smaller in getting news from cell phones and other mobile devices. And those who get only some or little enjoyment from following the news are about as likely as those who enjoy it a lot to get news from social networks (20% vs. 24%).

About a quarter (26%) of those who get only some or little enjoyment from following the news did not get any news yesterday. That compares with just 5% of those who enjoy following the news a lot.

Most “Graze” for News

The availability of online and digital news has increased the ability of Americans to get news when they want. In 2010, those who check in on news from time to time, as opposed to getting it at regular times, became a clear majority. That remains the case today: 57% describe themselves as the type of person who checks in on the news from time to time compared to 37% who get news at regular times.

These news habits vary by age group. Nearly eight-in ten (79%) of those 18 to 29 graze the news during the day. Among those 30 to 49, 64% say their preference is to check in
for news from time to time, a proportion that drops to 44% for those 50 to 64 and 33% for those 65 and older.

People who get news from TV or newspapers are more likely than those who get news from digital news platforms to get news at regular times. Nearly six-in-ten (57%) of those who read a newspaper yesterday and 49% of those who watched TV news say they get news at regular times. That compares with only about a third (35%) of those who got news online or digitally yesterday and 31% of those who saw news or news headlines on social networks.

Weather News Remains Top Draw

Despite major changes in the way Americans get news, the topics that interest people have changed very little over time. Weather continues to be the most popular news topic: 52% say they follow weather news very closely. No other type of news comes close.

About a quarter say they very closely track news about crime (28%), people and events in their community (26%) and sports (26%). Other topics, including news about political figures and events in Washington (17%) and news about international affairs (14%) are less popular.

There are age differences in interest in news about number of subjects, particularly political figures and events in Washington: Just 5% of those younger than 30 follow this news very closely, the lowest of any age group. And only 43% of young people follow Washington news very or fairly closely; 57% say they follow it not too closely or not at all closely. Majorities in older age groups follow Washington news at least fairly closely.

Interest in Local, National, International News

Majorities say they follow local (57%) and national news (54%) most of the time, whether or not something important is happening. But that is not the case when it comes to international news. Only about four-in-ten (39%) follow overseas news most of the time, compared with 56% who follow it only when something important is happening.

These views have changed little in recent years. But in 2004, 52% said they followed international news most of the time, whether or not something important was happening. That fell to 39% in 2006 and remained at that level in 2008 and in the current survey.

A Pew Research Center report in June found that news interest in individual foreign news stories to that point in 2012 had been lower than in 2011, when the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, the “Arab spring” and the killing of Osama bin Laden occurred. (See“Interest in Foreign News Declines,” June 6, 2012.)

Notably, there are large educational differences in the numbers following national news most of the time, but not international news. College graduates (69%) are far more likely than those with some college experience (53%) or those with a high school education or less (44%) to say they follow national news most of the time, regardless of whether something important is happening. But comparable percentages of all three groups say they follow international news most of the time (43% of college graduates, 40% of those with some college, 37% of those with no more than a high school education).

Most Want News with No Point of View

Nearly two-thirds (64%) of the public say they prefer getting political news from sources that don’t have a particular point of view, compared with 26% who would rather get news from sources that share their political perspective. This is on par with opinions since 2006.

There continue to be sizable educational differences in opinions about political news with a point of view: 75% of college graduates, and 69% of those with some college experience say they prefer political news with no point of view. That compares with 53% of those with no more than a high school education.

Majorities across the political spectrum say they would rather get news with no particular point of view. Conservative Republicans are significantly more likely to express this view than they were in 2010 (58% now, 48% then). There have been more modest changes in the views of other political groups.

Most Americans also continue to reject the idea that the news media are all pretty much the same. More than half (55%) say there are few news sources they trust more than others; 42% say the news media are pretty much the same.

As in previous surveys, conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats are more likely than moderates and independents to say that there are a few news sources they trust more than others. About seven-in-ten conservative Republicans (73%) and liberal Democrats (70%) express this view, compared with about half of independents (52%), moderate and liberal Republicans (51%) and conservative and moderate Democrats (49%).

Pagination