A Civil War of Screens: How Partisan Media Fractures American Democracy

A Civil War of Screens: How Partisan Media Fractures American Democracy

Alvin Sherman Library

Political polarization in the United States has always consistently posed a fragile threat to democratic stability, as seen in historic timelines of the Civil War. With the rise of highly partisan media, these threats have rapidly increased over the past two decades, forcing ideological division and threatening our nation's unity once again. This research focuses on whether partisan media affects political polarization. The study utilizes the NES data set and incorporates Framing Theory, Selective Exposure Theory, and Participatory Media Theory to examine the relationship between exposure to a particular media stream and ideological extremity. The results indicate that viewers of Tucker Carlson's program are more likely than the average citizen to self-report having a more conservative ideological position. Contrastingly, exposure to MSNBC does not appear to have a significant influence on the self-identification of more liberal ideological positions. The overall education level, perceived economic fairness, and other structural factors of a society are more consistent factors of a person's ideology. This indicates that polarizing media primarily reinforces a person's already held beliefs, rather than persuading them to a more extreme viewpoint, thereby deepening the already massive ideological divides in America and splitting the country, which was built on the idea of unity, into two.