Media Polarization Quotes

The media increase the political nastiness while distancing voters from those clashes. Citizens become spectators. ­Headline-­driven news emphasizes the extremes, the fights, the hysteria, the sensational. Political reporters, trying to appear objective by quoting two opposing sides to almost every story, mostly sharpen the differences, slighting any centrist position.

I think the 24-hour news cycle has helped exaggerate the differences between the parties. You can always find someone on TV somewhere carping about something. That didn't happen 20 years ago.

My country tis of thee, to take swings at each other on talk show TV.

Twenty-two percent of Americans say their primary news source is Fox News. It's divided our country in a way that we haven't been divided probably since the Civil War, and its empowered large corporations to get certain kinds of politicians and ideologues who are in the United State Congress elected -- the Tea Party ideologues who control the Republican Party.

'Betchya Got A Cure' is my gut response to the media wars in this country, which are driving a wedge between citizens. It's about taking a stand for individuality and being brave instead of being accepted.

Fox News is really two news networks. It's a center right news network that has good, solid, interesting coverage if you're watching Chris Wallace or the panel on 'Special Report' or anything like that. Then, it has what Hannity and others like him do, which is just a sort of tribal identity politics for older white people.

Larry King's show got to be an increasingly lonely outpost of humane civility in a mephitic menagerie of hotheads, saber rattlers, cretins and crackpots.

The people we want in our news prime-time space now are strongly opinionated people who I think, for the most part, attract audiences of like-minded people, who want to know 'what's our side thinking right now?'

People are getting cynical about the news. It doesn't seem like there's one place to watch where you get the straight dope. You watch the channel that proves your point.

Some liberals have a problem with me simply because I work at Fox, and nothing I do short of storming off the set in a rage will get them to respect that I work there.

The spread of communications technologies - social media, TV news channels - aggravates societal divisions and discord. All that online snarling is making us jittery.

Politicians and leaders who see the media as 'the enemy within' divide society into two clashing cultural camps. Populist demagogues benefit from binary oppositions.

Even if everything its detractors say about Fox were true, the most liberal of liberal attitudes would be that one would get credit for being in the lion's den.

Maybe it's true that people with less extreme views who are also interested in public affairs have been driven out by a marketplace that doesn't offer them anything of the tone they want to listen to.

The issues at the core of our national debates are more complicated than can be explained in soundbites and slogans by talking-heads and special guests. The media caters to our TL;DR-afflicted nation with over-simplified lowest common denominator journalism which completely fails us when the issues are not black-or-white or when the answers require caveats. Nuanced discussions don’t make attention grabbing headlines or dramatic journalistic copy so media reporting disproportionately accentuates extreme perspectives to create the conflict-drama that drives viewers and readership. The resulting rhetoric polarizes rather than convinces.

I'm liberal, but I watch the three majors. Obviously I watch MSNBC, also CNN and Fox, which is what I would call ridiculously to the right.

Progressives want a different sort of media than what the Right wants.

Technology has allowed the creation of media echo chambers, so that a person can reinforce, rather than debate, viewpoints.

In America, to have news that has explicitly taken a position is a very strange place to be in, and it's a very dangerous place to be in. And that's happening on Facebook, as you saw, and that's happening online. People are just being given their news and not the news, which is really, really scary.

If a major source of the nation's news is personalizing user experiences, people with different points of view will end up in echo chambers of their own design. Facebook didn't create that problem, but it shouldn't aggravate it.

The New York Times is most definitely a left-wing concern that is openly contemptuous of the conservative, traditional point of view. That is the primary reason the paper may soon dissolve.

The people who watch Fox are not going to watch CNN. You know, let's be honest.

PBS was not a left-wing ideology. I mean, Air America was, but PBS was not. But anybody who tells the truth is now branded and marginalized. The devolution of the American press began in 1986 when Ronald Reagan abolished the fairness doctrine.

Liberals watch MSNBC; conservatives watch Fox. They don't want to hear ten seconds of a liberal on Fox, and they don't want to hear ten seconds of a conservative on MSNBC.

Trump's agenda is not polarizing. A majority of Americans voted for it. A majority of Americans are clamoring for it. A majority of Americans are asking the Republicans in Congress to get off their hands and implement it! Trump's agenda is not polarizing except to the establishment and to the Democrats and the media. But it's not polarizing out in the country.