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SALT LAKE CITY — The level of political discourse in the U.S. as the general election nears has never seemed more polarized, and politicians, the media and the American people are all to blame.
A June analysis of American political attitudes found that basic American beliefs and values are more polarized along partisan lines than at any point in the past 25 years, when the Pew Research Center began its survey of American values.
The partisan gap has nearly doubled during that time period — from 10 percent to 18 percent — and nearly all of the change occurred during the Bush and Obama presidencies, according to Pew. But at the same time, divides along lines such as race, religion and socioeconomic status have remained stable.
The parties are also becoming more homogenous, with Republicans more likely now to identify as conservatives and Democrats, as liberals. And as the polarity of the parties increases, so does the polarity of the media.
A September study of the nation's newspapers found that those who identify as liberal or conservative were more likely to get press than moderates or bipartisan groups.
Part of that is the desire in journalism to always get "both sides" of a story, and part of that is public demand: the September Pew news consumption survey found that more than a quarter of Americans prefer to get their news from organizations that share their political opinion.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, cable news networks that lean away from the center are seeing high ratings, while CNN — commonly cited as the least biased of the cable news networks — is seeing its ratings hit historic lows.
Fox News is firmly planted right of the center, as MSNBC swings left, and both networks seem to grow more firmly entrenched in their respective ideologies as time passes.
While CNN claims to remain dedicated to covering the news in the traditional way, Fox News is right, and MSNBC is left, because that is what gets viewers. Bill O'Reilly and Rachel Maddow draw higher ratings than even-handed analysis, and ultimately, the stations are businesses, and profit is the bottom line.
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Despite their willingness to choose obviously right- or left-leaning cable news, American distrust in the media reporting accurate and fair news hit a new high in September, according to a Gallup poll. When it came to trust, 60 percent of Americans had "not very much" or "none at all," up from a low of 49 percent in 2006.
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Spin is made easy, though, when politicians themselves seem to be doing their best to make the normally routine into a contentious battle for the soul of their respective parties. Take the 112th Congress, for example, which seems to be making a run for the worst Congress in U.S. history. This Congress hovers somewhere between Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez in popularity with the American people, but continually fails to try to remedy the situation.
Instead, Congress is on track to have the least productive session since at least 1948, when data was first collected. Harry Truman dubbed that Congress the "do-nothing Congress," but it does not hold a candle to what the nation is experiencing now, when the two sides of the aisle cannot even agree on something as simple as a highway bill, let alone anything of real consequence.
It's not necessarily that Congress is lazy, rather that it is the most polarized it has been since the Reconstruction, and the most likely to vote along party lines in U.S. history. The 112th Congress has made it easy for Fox News to be right and MSNBC to be left — and for CNN to continue to lose prime time viewers — when there is just so much coming from the other side that is cause for complaint.
That is not to say that because it is easy — because Congress is a punchline in itself, or because the American public will continue to knowingly watch biased media even while complaining of unfair journalism — it is the right thing to do. But in the 21st-century political landscape, polarity wins the day, along with the ratings. It's good business sense, and as the NFL recently learned, people will generally continue to tune in despite their complaints. It's the American way.
