09-08-2017, 05:52 PM
Why there is no "Democratic" media
Quote:But conservative media like Fox and Breitbart don’t succeed because they lie, they succeed because they push an ideological agenda. Their message may be flexible with facts, but is consistent in its overarching vision, as well as with the agenda of the Republican Party. And this works because, as political scientists Matt Grossmann and David Hopkins write in their book Asymmetric Politics, the Republican Party is defined by ideology.Why Verrit, a pro-Clinton media platform, is doomed to fail | Michael Paarlberg | Opinion | The Guardian
The Democrats, on the other hand, are defined by their constituent social groups. Their agenda is to defend the rights and advance the interests of those often historically marginalized groups, and as such will pursue certain specific progressive policy goals. But they lack a holistic ideological approach, a liberal counterpart to the movement conservativism that grounds the Republicans and the media outlets that power that movement. Thus there’s far less appetite among Democrats for the type of unsubtle propaganda that Verrit traffics. One can see it in the way Fox News trounces MSNBC in viewership: Republicans see Fox as the only news source they can trust in media landscape that does not align with their values. Democrats would rather just read the New York Times.
News outlets serve different purposes for the two parties: as Grossmann and Hopkins write, Republicans “view themselves as engaged in an ideological battle with a hostile liberal establishment, turning even their choice of news source into a conscious act of conservative self-assertion.” Democrats, on the other hand, are happy with “traditional media sources that often implicitly flatter the Democratic worldview but do not portray themselves or their consumers as combatants in a political or ideological conflict.”