Pew media study confirms that polarization is mainly a right-wing phenomenon

Pew’s “News Media Tracker.” Click on the image to access the interactive version.

Surveys in which people are asked whether they trust the media invariably come to two conclusions: (1) Despite findings that show widespread distrust, people actually do trust the news sources they use; and (2) Democrats avail themselves of a far wider range of sources than do Republicans.

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Those verities were reconfirmed by a study published earlier this month by the Pew Research Center. Titled “The Political Gap in Americans’ News Sources,” the researchers found that a majority of Republicans and Republican “leaners” rely on Fox News, with smaller percentages also consuming other right-wing sources such as Breitbart, the Tucker Carlson Network and Joe Rogan’s podcast.

Democrats and Democratic leaners, meanwhile, get their news from a variety of mainstream sources such as The New York Times, NPR, the three big broadcast networks, CNN and MSNBC, with some delving into The Atlantic, The Guardian and Axios.

Interestingly, more Democrats (16%) than Republicans (12%) rely on The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by the Murdoch family. The Journal’s opinion section is extremely conservative but increasingly unsympathetic to President Trump’s agenda on tariffs and other economic issues, while its news pages are superb.

One aspect of the Pew report that I found fascinating was an interactive graphic called the “News Media Tracker,” which shows how popular and trusted 30 media outlets are with Democrats and Republicans as well as with different age groups. I don’t see any way of embedding it, but you can access it by clicking here or on the graphic above. It’s a fantastic tool, though it would be even better if you could track party affiliation and age group; as it’s set up, you have to choose one or other other.

The phenomenon that Pew tracks is sometimes called “asymmetric polarization,” meaning that our deeply polarized political culture is more a consequence of Republicans moving far to the right than it is of Democrats moving left — although that has happened too.

In 2017 I wrote about a similar study for GBH News. The study, which was published by the Columbia Journalism Review, was based on social-media sharing habits rather than a survey, so Breitbart actually did much better among Republicans than Fox News, whose website was wretched back then. (It looks a little better now.)

The challenge is that Fox and its ilk are purveyors of weaponized propaganda, cheerleading for Trump rather than reporting the news fairly and truthfully. Mainstream outlets, for all their many faults, are dedicated to reporting the truth, verifying their facts and correcting their mistakes.

Thus we end up with asymmetric news coverage as well, in which the mainstream reports critically on Republicans and Democrats while the right-wing outlets are critical only of Democrats. It’s a huge factor in understanding our broken politics.

How Sahan Journal is using AI to streamline its operations; plus, more on search, and screening pitches

Cynthia Tu of Sahan Journal. Photo (cc) 2025 by Lev Gringauz / MinnPost

Like it or not (and my own feelings are mixed), artificial intelligence is being used by news organizations, and there’s no turning back. The big question is how.

The worst possible use of AI is to write stories, especially without sufficient human intervention to make sure that what’s being spit out is accurate. Somewhat more defensible is using it to write headlines, summaries and social-media posts — again, with actual editors checking it over. The most promising, though, is using it to streamline certain internal operations that no one has the time to do.

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That’s what’s happening at Sahan Journal, a 6-year-old digital nonprofit that covers immigrants and communities of color in Minnesota. It’s one of the projects that Ellen Clegg profile in our book, “What Works in Community News.” And according to Lev Gringauz of MinnPost (one of the original nonprofit news pioneers), the Journal has embarked on a project to streamline some of its news and business functions with AI. (I learned about Gringauz’s story in Nieman Lab, where it was republished.)

Bolstered with $220,000 in grant money from the American Journalism Project and OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, the Journal has employed AI to help with such tasks as processing financial data of the state’s charter schools, generating story summaries for Instagram, and adding audio to some articles.

The real value, though, has come in bolstering the revenue side, as the Journal has experimented with using AI to retool its media kit and to understand its audience better, such as “pulling up how much of Sahan Journal’s audience cares about public transportation.”

“We’re less enthusiastic, more skeptical, about using AI to generate editorial content,” Cynthia Tu, the Journal’s data journalist and AI specialist, told Gringauz. Even on internal tasks, though, AI has proved to be a less than reliable partner, hallucinating data despite Tu explicitly giving it commands not to scour the broader internet.

And as Gringauz observes, OpenAI is bleeding money. How much of a commitment makes sense given that Sahan Journal may be building systems on top of a platform that may cease to exist at some point?

Two other AI-related notes:

➤ Quality matters. In his newsletter Second Rough Draft, Richard J. Tofel has some useful thoughts on the panic over Google’s AI search engine, which has been described as representing an existential threat to news organizations since it will deprive them of click-throughs to their websites.

Tofel writes that clickbait will be harmed more than high-quality journalism, noting that The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have been hurt less than HuffPost, Business Insider and The Washington Post. “If there is one overriding lesson of publishing in the digital age,” Tofel writes, “it remains that distinctive content remains the most unassailable, the least vulnerable.”

Though Tofel doesn’t say so, I think there’s a lesson for local news publishers as well: hyperlocal journalism should be far less affected by AI search than national outlets, especially for those organizations that emphasize building a relationship with their communities.

➤ Here’s the pitch. Caleb Okereke, a Ph.D. student at Northeastern, is using AI to screen pitches for his digital publication Minority Africa. He writes that “we are receiving 10x more pitches than we did in our early days after launch,” adding: “With a lean editorial team, we faced a challenge familiar to many digital publications: how do you maintain depth, fairness, and attention when the volume scales but the staff doesn’t?”

He and his colleagues have built a customized tool called Iraka (which means “voice” in the Rutooro language) and put it to the test. As he writes, it’s far from perfect, though it’s getting better.

“As of now, editors are using Iraka individually to provide a first-pass on submissions, testing its utility alongside regular human review,” Okereke reports. “Every pitch is still manually read, and no editorial decisions are made solely based on the model’s output. This staged integration allows us to observe how the tool fits into existing workflows without disrupting the editorial process.”

Why the rise of social media has given us a less happy, more polarized and dangerous world

In his 2010 book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains,” Nicholas Carr argued that our immersion in digital media is rewiring the way we think, turning us into distracted skimmers who are losing the capacity for deep concentration.

Yet social media was in its infancy back then. His lament in those days was aimed at a panoply of online distractions such as email that needed to be written, blogs that cried out to be read, streaming videos, downloadable music — in other words, anything but the task at hand. He mentions Facebook, but only in passing. Over the years, I’ve sometimes wondered what he would make of the explosion not just of Facebook but of Instagram, TikTok and their ilk now that they’ve taken over so much of our lives.

Well, my question has been answered. Earlier this year Carr published what is essentially a follow-up to “The Shallows.” Titled “Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart,” the book surveys the mediascape of algorithmically driven tech platforms and finds that it is not just driving us to distraction but is creating a less happy, more polarized and more dangerous world.

Read the rest at Poynter Online.

Why the emergence of an effective third party will remain a fantasy unless we change how we vote

Lincoln led not just the birth of a new nation but of a new political party as well.

We are awash in terrible news, so this morning I’d like to address something completely different. On Saturday, Nate Cohn of The New York Times asked, “Is There an Opening for a Third Party?” (gift link). My answer is an emphatic no, with a caveat.

Cohn is a smart guy who understands numbers. But he omits some important reasons for why the rise of a real alternative to the Democrats and Republicans will remain a fantasy unless it is accompanied by a thorough-going change in the way we hold elections.

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Cohn’s reasoning for why there might be an opening is solid, though I think that opening is much smaller than he imagines. He argues that as the two major parties have both embraced different forms of populism, the neoliberals and globalists who were ascendant as recently as 20 years ago have been left behind. He writes:

What’s the group? It doesn’t have a name, but it favors things like deficit reduction, deregulation, free trade and high-skilled immigration. It may be recognizable by the labels its critics on both the left and right have already assigned: “neoliberals” or “globalists.” (Though, to be fair, this new group doesn’t necessarily idealize markets or oppose government spending.)

So essentially Cohn is talking about Never Trump conservatives plus Joe Manchin. You could fit them all in a phone booth. (For you young ’uns, here’s a phone booth.) Cohn pays lip service to past examples of third parties like the Progressives of the early 20th century and the Republicans in the 1850s. But he misses some vital context.

A two-party system is baked into our politics not because anyone likes it but because we have winner-take-all elections in which the candidate who comes in first is the victor, even if they get less than 50% of the vote. Yes, I realize there are some exceptions, such as jurisdictions that hold runoffs or have embraced ranked-choice voting. But that’s how it works for nearly all of our major-office elections such as the House, the Senate and gubernatorial races. (Let’s not get started on the Electoral College.)

Now, I don’t want to take credit for an idea that I read somewhere else recently. I can’t seem to find it, but I thought it was something that Josh Marshall wrote for Talking Points Memo. But the examples of the Republicans and the Progressives actually show why third parties flop.

First, the Republicans couldn’t succeed unless they replaced the Whigs, which were one of the two major parties along with the Democrats. The Whigs were conflicted on slavery while the Democrats were all for it. Thus there was an opening for a party that was staunchly anti-slavery. Within just a few years’ time, the Whigs fell apart and were replaced by the Republicans, maintaining the major-party duopoly. So that’s my caveat, and it’s not much of one.

The Progressives actually ran a popular former president, Theodore Roosevelt, as their standard-bearer in 1912. Roosevelt managed to come in second, with the incumbent Republican president, William Howard Taft, finishing in third and getting swamped in the Electoral College. Roosevelt’s challenge succeeded only in getting Democrat Woodrow Wilson elected, and he proved to be a racist warmonger with an unparalleled contempt for civil liberties.

Progressive ideas started to permeate into the two major parties, especially the Democratic party. And Roosevelt’s distant cousin Franklin embraced a progressive agenda once he became president in 1933.

So how would we have to change the system in order to give a third party a chance to emerge as a significant force? With congressional and state legislative races, the surest route to new parties would be multicandidate districts and proportional presentation, as explained in this data-rich opinion piece (gift link; trust me when I tell you this is well worth your time) published by The New York Times earlier this year. The piece even anticipates the emergence of five parties under such a system. (I’d be a New Liberal with some New Populist sympathies.)

Massachusetts has nine U.S. House members, so imagine dividing the state into two districts, one with five members and the other with four. Let’s say that in the five-member district 60% of voters chose the New Liberal Party (traditional Democrats, more or less), 40% chose the Growth and Opportunity Party (traditional Republicans) and 20% chose the Progressive Party. The district would send three Democrats, two Republicans and one Progressive to Washington. The other two parties under this scheme: the Patriot Party (Trumpers) and Christian Conservatives.

Such a system, the Times essay argues, would encourage coalition-building and would give voters the opportunity to feel like there’s a party that represents their beliefs and interests — something that is entirely missing today.

All of this is why talking about a third party is a waste of time unless it’s accompanied by deep, systemic change. Given our slide into populist authoritarianism and the emergence of millions of Americans who oppose that slide, either we’re further than ever from trying something completely new — or we’re closer than we’ve ever been before.

Ellen Clegg describes the challenge facing Minnesota’s local media following a political assassination

Melissa Hortman in a 2021 public domain photo

My What Works partner Ellen Clegg has written a must-read piece on how local newsrooms in Minnesota are responding to the assassination of Melissa Hortman, a member and former speaker of the Minnesota House.

Hortman and her husband, Mark, were fatally shot while another public official, state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, suffered serious but non-fatal gunshot wounds. The gunman, identified as Vance Boelter, remains at large as of 5:10 p.m.

While a larger news outlet like The Minnesota Star Tribune has the reporting capacity to cover a big breaking-news story like this, Ellen writes that smaller outlets, often launched with a handful of journalists, now find themselves scrambling to keep up.

She puts it this way: “An all-hands national news story like this poses a core question for hyperlocal newsrooms, which typically launch with smaller staffs and a tightly focused mission of covering neighborhood people, politics and policies.”

Thugs assault U.S. senator for asking a question; plus, showdown for public media, and an odd omission

Click on image for the ABC News report

This morning I feel like anyone who comments on media and politics ought to say something about Thursday’s unprovoked assault on U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla. But I’m at a loss for words. I assume you’ve seen it; if you haven’t, here it is (gift link), along with a detailed New York Times account.

Federal agents are seen dragging the California Democrat from a room where Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was holding a news conference, forcing him to the floor and handcuffing him. He was soon released and was not charged, but this is what an authoritarianism takeover looks like.

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I was interested that Noem at least had the presence of mind to lie, falsely claiming that Padilla had “lunged” toward the stage and didn’t identify himself. All you have to do is watch the video to see the truth. All he was trying to do was ask a question. And, of course, Republicans, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, have picked up on her lies. Heather Cox Richardson writes:

While much focus has been on the assault itself, what Noem was saying before Padilla spoke out is crucially important. “We are not going away,” she said. “We are staying here to liberate this city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

In other words, the Trump administration is vowing to get rid of the democratically elected government of California by using military force. That threat is the definition of a coup. It suggests MAGA considers any political victory but their own to be illegitimate and considers themselves justified in removing those governmental officials with violence: a continuation of the attempt of January 6, 2021, to overturn the results of a presidential election.

Finally, I am never going to mention Noem without reminding you that she bragged about shooting her dog and her goat.

Public media’s last stand

I had hoped that President Trump’s plunge in the polls might stiffen the spines of House Republicans enough that they would not vote to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides some of the revenues for PBS and NPR. No such luck.

As NPR reports, the House voted on Thursday to eliminate $1.1 billion in previously appropriated money that was supposed to fund CPB for the next two years. Another $8.3 billion was cut from international-aid programs. The measure passed, 214 to 212, with every Democrat and four Republicans voting against it.

So now it’s on to the Senate, where the Republican majority is slightly less right-wing than the House’s. At this point, though, all bets are off.

A curious omission

There is so much going on, nearly all of it bad, that I’m going to have to leave most of it aside. But I do want to mention that on Thursday I listened to Ezra Klein’s New York Times interview (you can subscribe to “The Ezra Klein Show for free at all the usual podcast haunts) with former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who has accused the Netanyahu government of committing war crimes in Gaza.

It was a long, fascinating conversation. Yet there was scarcely a mention of Iran’s nuclear-weapons program and none at all of the possibility that Israel would soon act to destroy it — something that definitely had been in the news lately.

And now Israel has attacked Iran. In retrospect, it seems like a lost opportunity.

ABC goes too far in pushing out Terry Moran; plus, Google’s AI assault, and Jay Rosen moves on

Terry Moran, right, interviews Donald Trump in April 2025. Public domain photo by Joyce N. Boghosian via the White House.

How to behave on social media has bedeviled journalists and confounded editors for years. Marty Baron clashed with reporters Wesley Lowery and Felicia Sonmez over their provocative Twitter comments back when he was executive editor of The Washington Post, and those are just two well-known examples.

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The latest journalist to run afoul of his news organization’s social-media standards is Terry Moran, who was, until Tuesday, employed by ABC News. Moran was suspended on Sunday after he tweeted that White House official Stephen Miller and President Trump is each a “world-class hater.” The tweet is now gone, but I’ve included an image. On Tuesday, Moran’s employer announced that they were parting company with him, as NPR media reporter David Folkenflik writes.

I think ABC was right to suspend Moran but wrong to get rid of him, and that media critic Margaret Sullivan got the nuances perfectly when she wrote this for her newsletter, American Crisis:

I’m amazed that Moran posted what he did. It’s well outside the bounds of what straight-news reporters do. It’s more than just calling a lie a lie, or identifying a statement as racist — all of which I think is necessary. Moran is not a pundit or a columnist or any other kind of opinion journalist….

I would hate to see Moran — with his worthy career at ABC News, where he’s been for almost 30 years — lose his job over this. I hope that the honchos at ABC let a brief suspension serve its purpose, and put him back to work.

Unfortunately, this is ABC News, whose corporate owner, Disney, disgraced itself earlier this year by paying $15 million to settle a libel suit brought by Trump over a minor, non-substantive error: George Stephanopoulos said on the air that Trump had been found “liable for rape” in a civil case brought by E. Jean Carroll when, in fact, he’d been found liable for sexual abuse. The federal judge in the Carroll case even said in a ruling that the jury had found Trump “raped” Carroll in the ordinary meaning of the term. But Disney couldn’t wait to prostrate itself before our authoritarian ruler.

So when Moran violated ABC News’ social-media policy, as the organization claimed, he no doubt knew he could expect no mercy.

Continue reading “ABC goes too far in pushing out Terry Moran; plus, Google’s AI assault, and Jay Rosen moves on”

Introducing a Bluesky news feed

Photo (cc) 2016 by Susanne Nilsson

I’m trying something new with Media Nation: I’ve embedded my Bluesky feed in the right-hand rail (scroll down), and I’m using it to post shorter items of news and commentary that aren’t worth a full blog post. I should say that this is what I used to do with Twitter before Elon Musk (1) turned the place into a toxic cesspool and (2) changed the API so that embedded feeds no longer worked.

Admittedly this will work best for readers who are using a computer. If you’re reading Media Nation on your phone, you’ll need to scroll to somewhere near the bottom. Of course, you can also follow me on Bluesky.

This might mean that I’ll write fewer multi-item posts, since the short items I was including often were the sorts of things I used to post to Twitter. I also realize it’s not of much help to folks who get new Media Nation posts delivered by email. But as I said, the solution to that is to join Bluesky and follow me there. I promise to try to be substantive.

Journalists covering the unrest in LA are being obstructed, assaulted and injured

You may have seen the video. Lauren Tomasi of 9News in Australia is doing a standup in the middle of a Los Angeles street. Behind her, some distance away, are uniformed police officers. She tells viewers that “the situation has now rapidly deteriorated. The LAPD moving in on horseback, firing rubber bullets at protesters, moving them on through the heart of LA.”

She flinches briefly as another rubber bullet is fired. Then another — and she’s hit in the leg, crying out in pain and bending over. The camera moves away from her and we hear a male voice asking, “You OK?”

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Tomasi went live after the incident and doesn’t appear to be much worse for the wear. She was lucky. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, law enforcment officers have assaulted, obstructed and injured a number of reporters who are covering the unrest in Los Angeles touched off by an ICE raid at a Home Depot on Friday. The CPJ writes:

Law enforcement in Los Angeles, California, shot non-lethal rounds that struck multiple reporters while they covered protests that began on Friday, June 6, and escalated over the weekend following immigration raids. More than 20 others were reported to have been assaulted or obstructed.

And though Tomasi didn’t appear to be seriously hurt, rubber bullets can cause severe injuries. CPJ reports that Nick Stern, a British freelance photojournalist, underwent emergency surgery for injuries caused by a plastic bullet that struck him in the leg. The CPJ notes: “Stern told the BBC that he was wearing a press card around his neck and carrying his camera when he was shot.”

Is law enforcement targeting journalists? “Tomasi, holding a microphone and talking into a camera, was clearly a journalist,” writes Poynter media columnist Tom Jones. But as you can see from the video of Tomasi, she had embedded herself with a large swath of protesters. It’s possible that the police were firing at the protesters and she just happened to be in harm’s way.

The more important question is this: Why were officers firing at a crowd of what appeared to be peaceful demonstrators?

By the way, the “more than 20” number cited by CPJ is up to 37 as I write this, according to a database being maintained by journalist Adam Rose. There are some harrowing reports of journalists’ being taken to the hospital and being struck in the head and in the eye. CNN’s Erin Burnett is quoted as saying, “The officers are also pushing us … They knew we’re media. They were just as happy to push me as to push anybody else.”

“We are greatly concerned by the reports of law enforcement officers’ shooting non-lethal rounds at reporters covering protests in Los Angeles. Any attempt to discourage or silence media coverage by intimidating or injuring journalists should not be tolerated,” said CPJ executive Katherine Jacobsen. “It is incumbent upon authorities to respect the media’s role of documenting issues of public interest.”