The Role of the Media in Polarization

5min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The biggest obvious change we've had over the past several decades is in the way people get their information. We have entered into an era of choice-based media, nationalized choice-basedmedia. And nobody has a real theory of how it will change. I think that this is why we need more the physics of politics. This is the book I'm going to write. Okay. But you also mentioned the media, this was the final thing I really sort of wanted to home in on. Is it clear that there's a relationship between increased polarization and the fragmentation of the media or is that just a correlation that may or may not be causal?

People have always disagreed about politics, passionately and sometimes even violently. But in certain historical moments these disagreements were distributed without strong correlations, so that any one political party would contain a variety of views. In a representative democracy, that kind of distribution makes it easier to accomplish things. In contrast, today we see strong political polarization: members of any one party tend to line up with each other on a range of issues, and correspondingly view the other party with deep distrust. Political commentator Ezra Klein has seen this shift in action, and has studied it carefully in his new book Why We’re Polarized. We talk about the extent to which the apparent polarization is real, how we can trace its causes, and whether there’s anything we can do about it.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Ezra Klein received a B.A. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently the editor-at-large and founder of Vox. As a writer and editor his work has appeared in/on The Washington Post, MSNBC, Bloomberg, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker. Among his awards are Blogger of the Year (The Week), 50 Most Powerful People in Washington DC (GQ), Best Online Commentary (Online News Association), and the Carey McWilliams Award (American Political Science Association).