[BRIEF NOTE] On how the media can so quickly be polarized

[rfmcdonald]

Daniel Drezner makes an interesting point.

We're coming up on the five-year anniversary of Jon Stewart's verbal skewering of Crossfire in particular and the whole genre of left-right cable gabfests in general.  Stewart said these kind of shows were "hurting America" because of their general blather and failure to ask politicians good, sharp questions. 

Stewart's appearance on Crossfire generated quite the navel-gazing among the commentariat, and played no small role in the eventual disappearance of Crossfire, The Capitol Gang, Hannity & Colmes, and shows of that ilk.

So, five years later, I have a half-assed blog question to ask -- did Jon Stewart hurt America by driving these shows off the air? 

If you're expecting a lengthy defense of the Crossfire format right now, well, you're going to be disappointed.  My point rather, is to question what replaced these kinds of shows on the cable newsverse.  Instead of Hannity & Colmes, you now have.... Hannity.  Is this really an improvement? 

As inane as the crosstalk shows might have been, one of their strengths was that they had people with different ideological and political perspectives talking to (and sometimes past) each other.  You could argue that the level of discourse was pretty simplistic and crude -- but at least it was an attempt at cross-ideological debate.  People from different ideological stripes watched the same show and heard the same arguments.  Nowadays, if you're looking for that kind of exchange, you either have to fast all week until the Sunday morning talk shows, or go visit bloggingheads.

Instead of Crossfire-style shows on cable news, you now have content like Hannity, Glenn Beck, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, etc.  These programs have no cross-ideological debate.  Instead, you have hosts on both the left and the right outbidding each other to see who can be the most batsh**t insane ideologically pure.  These shows attract audiences sympathetic to the host's political beliefs, and the content of these shows help viewers to fortify their own ideological bunkers to the point where no amount of truth is going to penetrate their worldviews.  Which allows these hosts to say any crazy thing that pops into their head and hear nothing but "Ditto!" after they say it. 

This, incidentally, dovetails nicely with my reading of American legal scholar Cass Sunstein'sRepublic 2.0. In that tome, Sunstein argues that the Internet and other media technologies (satellite television, say) are having the effect of increasing the number of viewpoints and media sources available to different people, even giving individuals the chance to construct their own personalized newsfeed, but at the expense of mass media which could help promote the sense of common identity and ideological diversity necessary for a fully functional democracy. His argument makes too much sense to me, frankly. The blogs on my blogroll are mostly liberal blogs, with relatively rare exceptions like the Volokh Conspiracy, and while I read quite a few articles from a few different news sources in Canada via RSS, I don't read the National Post's RSS feed and I come across conservative news articles only via Google News.