The Closing of the American Mind

And the middle of the 20th century was a bit better on the question of cooperation. Back then the political parties tried to be big tents. The Democrats numbered conservative Southerners as well as liberal Northerners. The Republicans had some big-city liberals as well as rural conservatives. But then, starting in the 1960s, when Presidents Kennedy and Johnson bravely embraced civil rights, Southern conservatives deserted the Democrats. By the '80s, Democratic strength was centered in the big cities and along the coasts, and liberal interest groups had taken over the party. Neither party tried as hard to reach out to the ideologically diverse.

Partly in response to the impression of liberal bias in the mainstream media, the Republican right has made a highly successful industry out of talk radio and Fox News Channel, the network created by Roger Ailes, a former Nixon-Reagan political operative who cut his teeth peeling conservative ethnics away from the Democratic Party in the 1970s and '80s.

It is a mistake, however, to think that Fox News turns viewers into partisan conservatives. "They came that way," says Prior, the Princeton political scientist whose book, "Post-Broadcast Democracy," offers the clearest and most insightful explanation of why American politics has become more polarized. Fox was responding to a shift in the political landscape brought on largely by technological changes that drove media habits, says Prior. In his book, Prior shows that developments in broadcasting lie at the heart of some disheartening trends in American political life.

The old order—a larger, more politically moderate voting public—was a matter of choice, writes Prior, or rather a lack thereof. In 1970, at about 6:30 p.m. at least two or three nights a week, about half the country could be found watching the evening news on one of the three major networks. The broadcasts tended to be fairly sober-minded, on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand presentations by trusted anchormen like Walter Cronkite. The network news shows had to be evenhanded because they appealed to such large and politically diverse audiences, and because the networks had to mind a "Fairness Doctrine," imposed by Congress in return for granting precious broadcast licenses on the narrow bandwidth of VHF TV. The huge audiences watched them because, with only four or five channels to watch on most TVs, there wasn't much else on.

But then, in the 1980s and '90s, came cable TV and the Internet. Before long, viewers had scores of channels to choose from, or they could abandon TV altogether and entertain themselves online. Prior estimates that about half the viewers of the evening news wandered away to watch entertainment—sports, movies, reality TV, whatever. Today, the evening news shows draw about 10 percent of the viewing audience. For the political junkies, the offerings are much more bounteous than in 1970: not only 24-hour news channels but an infinitely expanding blogosphere. Some commentators and political figures—notably Al Gore, in his latest book, "The Assault on Reason"—see the Internet as democracy's last, best hope, a way of opening the world to free-flowing ideas. But others note that the Web tends to be long on opinion (which is cheap to produce) and short on actual reporting (which is expensive and strains the capacities of old-line news organizations shorn of viewers, listeners and readers).

Political junkies can find anything on the Internet, but what they look for tends to reinforce their prejudices. It is now possible to design a 24/7 "Daily Me" on the Web to replace that bulky, soggy but multifaceted newspaper that once landed in the driveway each morning. "We are creating enclaves of like-minded people," writes University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, author of "Republic.com 2.0," an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Historically, notes Sunstein, narrow-interest groups have fueled social progress, like the civil-rights movement—but also cults and Nazism. "There is a general risk that those who flock together, on the Internet or elsewhere, will end up both confident and wrong," writes Sunstein.