Read on Twitter
It may not have aged well, but it remains cable news’ preferred business model - pitch your coverage narrowly to an ideologically and demographically skewed audience, giving them lots of bias-confirming validation and rarely exposing them to contrary ideas in good faith. https://twitter.com/davidsirota/status/1347777414697345028
Then *really* confuse everyone by having your news anchors wallow in emotive opinion and your opinion hosts covering live events or debates as though they are serious anchors. And hire a bunch of “analysts” to launder partisan or ideological messages as Serious Analysis.
Then get all your personalities on Twitter, where their emotional hot-takes and history of likes inevitably reveal their true personal political leanings, so that anyone with differing views always suspects that they aren’t getting a fair shake when those people pop up on TV.
Then get your right-wing networks wallowing in permanent “look what you made us do” Victim Mode and your mainstream (read: progressive) networks stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that they played any role on driving conservative viewers away.
Then hey presto! Congratulations, now you have a totally fractured media landscape where both sides hold one another in total contempt (journalists included), and both groups of viewers operate from entirely different fact sets.
The diehard MAGA contingent in particular have now radicalized to an extent that greater moderation and professionalism by “mainstream” networks won’t be enough to win them back, because the things their believe are so wacky and obviously false that they simply can’t be indulged.
As @mtaibbi has written so often and far more eloquently than me, every aspect of the current media business model profits from political polarization and is incentivized to create more of it. Probably why they never report honestly on media trust issues beside lamenting Fox News
What I do find annoying is multimillionaire cable news anchors rending their garments about political polarization when most of them, unremarkable though they are, are at least smart enough to know deep down that they and their vapid little careers are part of the problem.
