gbaji wrote:
The point is that people tend to watch news shows that match their own viewpoint the most. Certainly, you wouldn't expect a large number of people to watch one that did nothing but present opinions that they themselves don't agree with at all.
I watched an entire season of Big Brother with my jaw on the floor, because I couldn't believe that the makers were allowed to get away with their treatment of participants psychologically and medically. If a medical or scientific institution designed a study with the Big Brothers rules, they wouldn't be able to get it past the ethics committee in the first place. I don't remember them all now, but in the first couple of episodes I counted about 11 or 13 set-ups of the physical conditions and the rules that were, on current psychological knowledge, guaranteed to generate emotional stress in the participants, and to guarantee divisions and fighting between the group members. Given how most humans react to stress, I was fairly confident that participants would hold themselves together pretty well for the most part while they were there, but were almost guaranteed for a bout of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome once they were out and freed from the situation.
I was a hooked viewer of Big Brother purely from a "Car Crash Effect" perspective.
gbaji wrote:
When that ratio gets sufficiently imbalanced, you'd expect to see the news coverage get progressively more lopsided over time. What the Pew study shows is that the more "mainstream" news stations are getting more lopsided, while Fox News is getting less lopsided.
That would seem to support the idea that it's those other stations that are presenting an imbalanced view of events and Fox that's presenting a more balanced view, not the other way around.
Edited, Aug 27th 2008 4:25pm by gbaji
That would seem to support the idea that it's those other stations that are presenting an imbalanced view of events and Fox that's presenting a more balanced view, not the other way around.
Edited, Aug 27th 2008 4:25pm by gbaji
Or it could mean that the mainstream news has plenty of room to get more lopsided, while Fox news has no room to get more lopsided towards a conservative bias, and is undergoing a drift to less lopsidedness in order to generate some plausible deniability, or because it's taken on board some of the criticisms of it, or it's just a function of change over time, as people within the structure change over time.
