How The Media Rage Machine Divides America: Chris Stirewalt

Let's Find Common Ground

USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future

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5 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2024

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From cars to entertainment, technology to retailing, most large industries have faced huge changes in the past thirty years. But none more so than the news business. Since 2000, countless numbers of local and regional newspapers went bust. Those that did survive fired a big percentage of their reporters and slimmed down. The past two decades also saw the rise of social media and highly opinionated online journalism, slanted well to the left or right of the political spectrum. Local reporting of how our towns, cities and states are run has died out in many parts of the country. Political journalist Chris Stirewalt is our guest in this episode. He is a contributing editor and regular columnist at the conservative news site, The Dispatch. Chris wrote the book, "Broken News: Why The Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back." Find more episodes of "Let's Find Common Ground" here. Learn more about The Common Ground Scorecard here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	A lot of Americans are fed up with the media.
0:03.0	Yeah, they've turned off TV and radio news or given up entirely on traditional newspapers.
0:10.0	But millions of others are now addicted to rage media, cable news and social media that push sensationalism, groupthink, and tribalism.
0:19.0	So in this episode, Broken News and an argument for why consumers should insist on better journalism.
0:28.0	So what I tell people is, if you are totally comfortable with what you see here, read, listen to, stream, that's not a good sign.
0:40.0	If you're doing it right, if you're living up to your obligations as a citizen, you should regularly be hearing things that you disagree with. This is let's find common ground. I'm Ashley Miln Tite.
1:07.0	And I'm Richard Davies.
1:09.0	30 years ago, the great majority of Americans watched, read, or listen to news that was brought to them
1:15.5	by teams of reporters and editors and much of the news was local.
1:21.2	But today the number one source for news in America is Facebook.
1:25.0	Some of the posts are little more than propaganda,
1:28.0	and many people only read opinions they agree with rather than being exposed to news from a variety of sources.
1:35.2	The dramatic changes in the news media are actually quite recent.
1:39.0	The trend of news bubbles is something that's happened over the past 30 years, as many regional
1:45.0	newspapers have gone bust.
1:47.2	Countless numbers of reporters have been laid off.
1:50.7	In the place of local news, we've seen the rise of slick and profitable national opinion journalism
1:55.9	that caters to narrow segments of the population.
1:58.8	Very different than when most people read the same local newspaper or watch the same nightly network news.
2:05.0	Our guest on this show is Chris Steyrwald, a contributing editor and regular columnist
2:10.1	at the conservative news site, The Dispatch.
2:13.0	He's also the co-host of the podcast,
	...

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