SALON
Wednesday, Nov 6, 2013 1:29 PM UTC
What Americans don't know and don't understand is an obstacle to progress
Marty Kaplan,
Alternet
(Credit: Wikipedia)
This article originally appeared on
AlterNet.
If you think the widening chasm between the rich and the rest spells
trouble for American democracy, have a look at the growing gulf between
the information-rich and-poor.
Earlier this year, a Harvard
economist’s jaw-dropping study of American’s beliefs about the
distribution of American wealth became a
viral video. Now a
new Pew study of the distribution of American news consumption is just as flabbergasting.
According
to the Harvard study, most people believe that the top 20 percent of
the country owns about half the nation’s wealth, and that the lower 60
percent combined, including the 20 percent in the middle, have only
about 20 percent of the wealth. A whopping 92 percent of Americans
think this is out of whack; in the ideal distribution, they said, the
lower 60 percent would have about half of the wealth, with the middle 20
percent of the people owning 20 percent of the wealth.What’s
astonishing about this is how wrong Americans are about reality. In
fact, the bottom 80 percent owns only 7 percent of the nation’s wealth,
and the top 1 percent hold more of the country’s wealth –
40 percent – than 9 out of 10 people think the top 20 percent should have. The top 10 percent of earners take home
half the income
of the country; in 2012, the top 1 percent earned more than a fifth of
U.S. income – the highest share since the government began collecting
the data a century ago.
But America’s information inequality is at least as shocking as its economic inequality.
Pew
sliced the TV news audience into thirds: heavy, medium and light. In
my Jeffersonian fantasy, that distribution would look like a bell curve;
in fact, it looks like a cliff. Heavy viewers watch a little over two
hours of TV news a day, but medium viewers barely watch a quarter of an
hour and light viewers average only two minutes a day. The top third of
the country does 88 percent of the day’s TV news viewing; the middle
third watches only 10 percent of the total time; the bottom third sees
just 2 percent of the minutes of news consumed. Two-thirds of Americans
live in an information underclass as journalistically impoverished as
the minuscule bazillionaire class is triumphant.This month, the Pew
Research Journalism Project reported how Americans get their news at
home. If you think it’s from the Internet, you’ll be surprised that the
38 percent of us who access news at home on a desktop or laptop spend
an average of only 90 seconds a day getting news online. America’s
dominant news source is television, and the disparity between heavy
viewers of TV news and everyone else is as startling as the gap between
the plutocrats and the people.
As for those heavy
news viewers, says Pew, “There is no news junkie like a cable junkie.” A
heavy local news viewer watches about 22 minutes of it a day at home,
and a heavy network news viewer watches about 32 minutes a day. But a
heavy cable news consumer averages 72 minutes of it a day. The gap
between heavy, medium and light cable news viewers is especially stark.
If you’re reading this, you’re probably in that
72-minutes-of-cable-news-a-day class. But medium cable news viewers see
barely more than three minutes of it a day, and light cable news
viewers see about 12 seconds of it a day. In other words, either you
live in the country that watches more than an hour of Blitzer, O’Reilly,
Maddow, et al, a day – or in the country that watches virtually none of
them at all.
If you want to know where this is heading, consider
another cheery piece of Pew research.
Americans 67 to 84 years old spend 84 minutes a day watching, reading
or listening to the news. Boomers (48 to 66) are close behind, at 77
minutes a day. But Gen Xers (33 to 47) spend 66 minutes, and
Millennials (18 to 31) spend only 46 minutes a day. The kids are tuning
out. I love it that 43 percent of “The Colbert Report” audience, and
39 percent of “The Daily Show” viewers,
are 18 to 29 years old;
the young audiences of those fake news shows get real news from them.
But fewer than a million and a half Americans under 50 are watching
them.
Much has been made of the ideological news bubbles we live
in, where we see the world exclusively through Fox-colored lenses, or
filters manufactured only by MSNBC or CNN. The Pew study upends this
belief. It’s true that about one-quarter of American adults watch only
Fox News, another quarter watch only CNN and 15 percent watch only
MSNBC. But 28 percent of Fox News viewers also watch MSNBC, and 34
percent of MSNBC viewers watch Fox. More than half of MSNBC viewers,
and nearly half of Fox viewers, watch CNN, and of CNN’s viewers, about 4
out of 10 also watch Fox, and 4 out of 10 also watch MSNBC.
It’s
encouraging that our self-segregation into polarized news ghettos is a
bit of a myth. But whatever joy there is in that finding is blunted by
the disparity between people who watch a lot of news and people who
watch almost none of it, and by the trend toward an even deeper division
ahead. The danger democracy faces isn’t so much that different
segments of our country inhabit alternative realities constructed from
different data delivered by different news sources. It’s that a
minority of the country watches a fair amount of news, and a majority
may as well be living on the moon.
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