By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm:
I have a confession to make: I cannot resist joining political arguments on social media. I know, I know, no one ever changes their minds and nearly all discussions end in stalemate. But for a student of psychology, argumentation, and persuasion, they can be pretty illuminating nonetheless. And the biggest takeaway is this: The left and the right today aren’t just divided by different policies, beliefs and attitudes. Instead they’re on different islands, subsisting on different information diets. The starting points, the facts that are taken to be true without the need for further support, the sources that are considered reliable and fair, all of these seem to depend on one’s preferred political leaning. And that liberal or conservative stance will determine and be determined by one’s preferred source of news. As Pew Research has reported, news viewers are more segregated than ever. And the differences between individual views on the full spectrum of current issues — race relations, environmental protection, healthcare, marriage equality, church and state, etc. — are very stark as a result.
That is why it is common to ask potential jurors in voir dire,”What is your preferred source of news on current events?” It wasn’t always the case, but in today’s polarized and ideologically segregated marketplace of ideas, the question serves as an increasingly effective proxy for, “What is your political leaning?” But as common as the question is, particularly when you have a supplemental questionnaire, I have found that attorneys don’t always know how to interpret and to use the results. In this post, I will try to share a bit of what we know on which sources are more conservative and which are more liberal, and what those evident differences in worldview might mean for the typical case.
Divided by News?
As I’ve written before, the halves of America’s ideological spectrum are far apart and the gap seems to be widening. A large part of the blame for this goes to the self-selected segregation of news sources. But that segregation doesn’t apply equally to both sides of the aisle. As the Pew Research report notes, liberals tend to trust many sources, while conservatives trust fewer. Deriding the so-called “mainstream media,” conservatives ironically gravitate to the largest player in the market, Fox News. The reliance on that source has the effect of normalizing what may have once been extreme views, while also insulating viewers from criticism and even from fact-checking. Writer Heather Hogan reviews many of these critiques of the network’s information habits in a robust and very well researched article on what she calls the “Propaganda Cycle,” of isolating viewers (based on the view that other sources cannot be trusted), creating enemies, appealing to fear, and ultimately creating a self-reinforcing reality. She also points to a 2012 Fairleigh Dickinson study of 1,185 random respondents showing that Fox News viewers actually end up being less informed on average than those who watch no news at all.
What’s the Spectrum?
Fox viewers will respond that most sources have an agenda, and that seems to be largely true. Just as there is Fox on the right, there is MSNBC on the left, and many sources at various other points in between. In interpreting and potentially scoring juror responses in voir dire, it helps to know exactly what the spectrum is, and thankfully, Pew Research Center did the work for you. Looking at trust levels given to various news sources depending on the rater’s ideological group (from “consistent liberals” to “consistent conservatives” and several points in between), Pew created the following graphic:
9(Click for larger view)
This list is dominated by print news and broadcast-oriented sites, but increasingly we are relying on online and specifically social media feeds as our main sources of news. So to supplement, Daily Kos offers a pretty comprehensive list of online news sources from the left to the right edges of the spectrum
How Does This Matter in Litigation?
Unlike demographic factors like race, age, education, and income, political leaning does turn out to be a pretty good predictor of initial leaning in a litigation context.
Conservative jurors are more likely to be:
- Pro-prosecution, pro-“law and order”
- Anti-lawsuit (they’re “frivolous”)
- Pro-business and pro-corporate
- Anti-government regulation, anti-bureaucracy
Liberal jurors tend to take the opposite positions. Of course, those are only general tendencies leading conservatives to favor criminal prosecution and civil defense, and leading liberals to favor criminal defense and civil plaintiffs. In most cases, that leaning will be an initial guide, but a mock trial or a community attitude survey will tell you more about the ways a juror’s politics and news sources will translate into a leaning in your case.
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Other Posts on Politics and Voir Dire:
- Know the Limits of Political Empathy
- Account for Your Venue’s Demographic Change
- Anticipate Antigovernment Attitudes
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Image credit: HonestReporting, Flickr Creative Commons, edited.