Just what is John Harwood of The New York Times trying to say in his recent piece on partisanship in cable news? I can’t figure it out. The opening lines seem to me riddled with ambiguity and offer no clear conclusion to the article. Why bother?
• Is this the conclusion?
“The Obama White House’s decision to challenge Fox News appears driven equally by strategy and frustration.”
I don’t think so. Harwood doesn’t provide any argument regarding why the Obama administration is choosing to act against Fox.
• Is this the conclusion?
“It is also a test case for politicians in both parties…Future Republican presidents will have to decide, as Team Obama has, how to buck or accommodate that trend.”
Harwood does tuck in a reason for this statement: “That is because partisan fragmentation throughout America’s news media and their audiences has grown significantly.”
But this reason assumes that politicians must, or at least should, react to growing partisan fragmentation in the media and their audiences. Harwood doesn’t justfy this assumption. One would have hoped the justification would have come in his previous statement, regarding why the Obama administration has chosen to react; Obama’s reasoning could then inform us as to why reaction was necessary. But we don’t see any of that here.
• More confusion:
Fox News has attracted the most attention because of its “fair and balanced” challenge to its competitors and its success. But the audiences of its competitors have tilted sharply in the other direction.
Wait, what? Is he trying to say that the audiences of Fox’s competitors are now less “fair and balanced” (a bit of a broad statement, not to mention random)? Or, that the audiences of Fox’s competitors have tilted away from Fox (which is just redundant)?
• Finally:
Press critics worry that the rise of media polarization threatens the foundation of credible, common information that American politics needs to thrive. Will Feltus, a Republican specialist in voter targeting, does not.
If it complicates the choices facing leaders in Washington, Mr. Feltus argues, it also decentralizes political communication in a way that is both inevitable and healthy in the information age. “I feel no hand-wringing about it,” Mr. Feltus said. “People are smart enough to understand what color filter is over the lens.”
If anything, I wonder whether Feltus has it backwards: Polarization does not decentralize, but rather that decentralization leads to polarization (for this position I rely on Lawrence Lessig’s Republic.com.
Regardless, is it not a little silly to be talking about decentralization when Harwood’s article is talking about Fox News, a station owned by a massive conglomerate?
I give up. Let me know in the comments if I’ve erred.
Shortened URL for this post: http://bit.ly/3cdLVw