The Increasing Polarization of American Media

Growing up in Washington D.C., politics was always a topic of conversation. Whether in school, at home, or even at parties, we would be talking about what’s going on down on the Hill. CNN would always be playing in the background during family dinner, and presidential debate watch parties were a must every election season. Being aware of the journalism surrounding politics in America for so many years has allowed me to see a very clear shift in 2 things: the way we interact with people with different political views and the way the news was reported. It slowly crept on us American’s, but when Trump was elected in 2016 the whole thing broke open. The country was divided and there was no point in hiding it anymore. My parents, who used to watch Fox in the morning, banned it from being played in the house. My social media feeds become a battleground for different political views. At some point, algorithms and unfollowing curated my feed into a liberal echo chamber where all of my followers shared articles from the New York Times and The Atlantic criticizing Republicans and affirming our own beliefs. America has transformed into a strongly partisan, polarized country, and American journalism has become a reflection of that. 

I think that part of the reason that American journalism has become so partisan is because they have no choice. In countries like France, an “elite core” of media outlets - as Ethan Zuckerburg defines them in his article on the polarization of French media, not only receive the money from the government to stay afloat. They also have the power to set the news agenda and ignore online popular media. They act as gatekeepers, managing to keep any sort of stories from non-traditional sources out of the national conversation. American media does not have this luxury. As American media rapidly continues to lose advertising revenue to the new gatekeepers of information, Facebook and Google, they must find a way to attract and retain readership. As a result, news outlets like The New York Times can’t ignore stories from that stem from online, such as stories out of WikiLeaks or Pizzagate. They either have to write about it, or risk losing readers who will go search for the story elsewhere. Furthermore, as news outlets grapple for readers, they have no choice but to pay attention to their demographics and try to tailor their stories to fit what their readers like. As much as The Washington Post claims objectivity, they will never write a story praising a policy decision made by Donald Trump. Their liberal readers will get mad and go somewhere else. News outlets simply can’t afford to take that risk anymore. 

I personally believe that partisan journalism can be positive to a certain extent. My viewpoint in journalism is relatively postmodern in the sense that I don’t think there is such a thing as writing from an objective standpoint. I think that acknowledging our subjectivity and partisan standpoints strengthens the trustworthiness of an article. I also believe that partisan journalism can be productive for opening up topics for debate. If everyone is taking a neutral opinion, there can be no discourse and therefore no progress. However, partisan journalism is only positive and productive to an extent. I think that right now, the extremely partisan route that journalism is taking is detrimental to American society. When journalism gets to a point where there is complete partisanship, all trust in the media disappears. Public opinion becomes completely divided and people begin to shout into echo chambers, attacking people on the other side. As Robert Talisse discusses in his article about polarization in America, the effects of group polarization are very strong. I think that Fox News and MSNBC becoming strictly Republican and strictly Democrat echo chambers promotes group polarization. As Talisse argues, group polarization only makes our beliefs more radical. There needs to be a middle ground or else the country will continue to divide until it breaks.  So even though I don’t necessarily believe in the notion of objective truth in journalism, it still has its benefits for American society. People have something to trust, that they know they can believe in, regardless of political affiliation. In Owen Jones article for The Guardian, “We can no longer pretend the British press is impartial”, he argues how certain news outlets are beginning to blur the lines between opinion pieces and news pieces. That is when partisanship becomes a problem. There needs to be a distinct marker that partisan reporting is opinion reporting. I think that similar to the U.K., America has also been blurring the lines between opinion and news facts. This encourages a dangerous rhetoric that one’s political opinion is absolute fact. Without sounding too authoritarian, people can be stupid and need guidance in knowing the difference between fact and opinion. At what point do we stop letting truth and falsehood grapple and let someone come in and say “this is the truth! Period.”

The balance between partisanship and objectivity in journalism is something that is very tricky to figure out. There needs to be a little bit of both in order for their to be trust in journalism and for increasingly polarized societies to function productively. American journalism is taking a dark turn as it becomes increasingly partisan. You can see it impacting our society in every way from increases in hate crimes to little to no bipartisanship in congress. I said earlier that American media has become a reflection of America becoming an increasingly polarized society. However, I think it works both ways, and that American society is reflecting the polarization in the media as well. Journalism and media are powerful and influential, the gatekeepers for our information, whether that be Facebook or The New York Times. The media has always served as a sort of guiding light for society in promoting discourse, revealing the truth, and keeping people engaged. The question now is whether or not the media will help us out of this deeply divided time or continue to split us apart.