If income inequality represents an increasing
drag on our economy, consider the impact that the huge gap between the information-rich
and the info-poor has on our democracy.
A new Pew study reveals that about two-thirds of
Americans pay very little attention to the news on a day-to-day basis.
Presumably, this group has little to no knowledge about current events, not to
mention politics and public policy.
The Pew researchers
divided the TV news audience (television still dominates as a source of news)
into three segments – heavy, medium and light — based on the amount of time
people are tuned in. What they found was a stunning divide, with the top third
watching far more news than the middle third. And the bottom third is simply
tuned out, watching mere seconds of news per day.
As summarized by AlterNet,
heavy viewers watch a little over two hours of TV news a day, but medium
viewers barely watch a quarter of an hour and light viewers average only two
minutes a day. The top third of the country does 88 percent of the day’s
TV news viewing; the middle third watches only 10 percent of the total time;
the bottom third sees just 2 percent of the minutes of news consumed.
What’s more, the Internet
is not much of a factor in the public’s knowledge of the news.
Journalism Project studied how Americans receive their news at home and found
that only 38 percent access news on a desktop or laptop, and they spend an
average of only 90 seconds a day getting news online.
Marty Kaplan of AlterNet
explains this phenomenon:
“As for those heavy news
viewers, says Pew, ‘There is no news junkie like a cable junkie.’ A heavy
local news viewer watches about 22 minutes of it a day at home, and a heavy
network news viewer watches about 32 minutes a day. But a heavy cable
news consumer averages 72 minutes of it a day.
“The gap between heavy,
medium and light cable news viewers is especially stark. Medium cable news
viewers see barely more than three minutes of it a day, and light cable news
viewers see about 12 seconds of it a day. In other words, either you live
in the country that watches more than an hour of Blitzer, O’Reilly, Maddow, et
al, a day – or in the country that watches virtually none of them at all.”
found a significant generation gap within all these info inequality numbers as
seniors spend 84 minutes a day watching, reading or listening to the news.
Those figures decline with the Baby Boomers and among Generation X until you
get down to the Millennials who devoted about half that much time to the day’s news.
What about the “The
Colbert Report” and “The Daily Show?” It’s true that young audiences learn
about current events from these fake news shows, but fewer than a million and a
half Americans under 50 are watching them.
One encouraging sign
coming out of the Pew research is that the problem with voters living within an
ideological bubble is not as pronounced as previously thought.
Large percentages of cable
viewers have the remote in hand, flipping from Fox to CNN to MSNBC.
Yes, about one-quarter of
American adults watch only Fox News and similar loyalties are demonstrated by
the audiences of CNN and MSNBC. But more than one-fourth of Fox viewers
also watch MSNBC, and more than one-third of MSNBC viewers watch Fox.
viewers, and nearly half of Fox viewers, watch CNN. And among CNN viewers,
about 4 in 10 also watch Fox or MSNBC.
The same search for
information across the political spectrum occurs online.
Some of the
most popular news websites, which comprise only a small percentage of total
online traffic, are affiliated with the three major cable news channels.
Pew found that
37 percent of those who visit foxnews.com also go to nbcnews.com (which
includes MSNBC-generated content), while nearly one-fourth of those who visit
nbcnews.com view foxnews.com.
In turn, about
30 percent of those who click on foxnews.com and one-fifth of those who visited
nbcnews.com also go to cnn.com. Among cnn.com users, one-fourth also went to
foxnews.com and one-third also clicked on nbcnews.com.
That’s a lot more
crossover than we’ve been led to believe.
As I pointed out earlier this month, U.S. polls about the Russian invasion of Ukraine are nearly worthless
because many survey respondents fib about how closely they’re following the
issue and, in truth, many of these people know so little about Ukraine they can’t
even find the country on a map.
A growing amount of
research – and basic man-on-the-street interviews – shows a deep degree of
ignorance on many basic issues among a large segment of the population. This
not only skews polls, it illogically steers public policy at a time when
poll-driven politics is more dominant than ever.
inequality, for example. It’s discussed routinely in the media – especially for
that deeply divided triad of TV viewers Pew talked about – but the polls carry
little weight because the public does not understand the weight of the issue.
A Harvard study that took
the common approach of splitting up income earners into five slices of America –
20 percent of earners in each segment – found that average voters are way off
in their assessment of financial inequality.
Most people guess far too
low when asked how wide the gap is between rich and poor. What’s more, the
study found that Americans believe an ideal distribution of wealth would be a
system where the bottom 60 percent would own about half of the wealth,
according to AlterNet.
In reality, the bottom 80
percent owns only 7 percent of the nation’s wealth. The top 1 percent holds 40 percent, which is more than what 9 in 10 people
think the entire top 20 percent should own.
politicians may want to ponder a key question when studying poll results: Who
supports Issue XYZ? Depends who you ask.
