(Fox News’s coverage of the story was so one-legged it was later called “Chaos On Bullshit Mountain” by the Daily Show, the news satire program on Comedy Central.)

Over at the left-leaning MSNBC  slogan: “Lean forward” it appeared nothing else happened in the world for days after the leak. The grainy footage was wallpapered onto the screen.

It is almost as though there are two elections going on in the United States at the moment, one entirely independent of the other.

Each side has its own set of facts, and each side is becoming increasingly baffled and frustrated that its opponent will not accept them.

Bias in American media is not new. During the Gilded Age the Hearst and Pulitzer press empires competed for readership with sensationalism and propaganda.

But after World War II the US media market settled into a detente where two or three newspapers and the three networks led national coverage. All of them strove to divorce opinion from news.

Back then, says David Maraniss, an associate editor with The Washington Post, the networks’ voices were no more rabid than the fatherly tones of anchors such as Walter Cronkite and Ed Murrow.

The detente collapsed with the rise of talk radio and then cable and internet news. The three networks have lost 50 per cent of their audience since 1980.

But this year, says Steve Schmidt, who as a senior strategist for John McCain’s campaign in 2008 was partly responsible for the selection of Sarah Palin as the Republican vice-presidential candidate, America’s media has become so polarised that it is now possible for followers of both camps to live entirely inside their own news echo chambers.

“It used to be as Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” says Schmidt, quoting the patrician Democrat senator who died in 2003.

“Well, now you can have your own facts too.”

It is a phenomenon becoming known as post-truth politics.

David Maraniss notes that hyper-partisanship has even spread into the more traditionally staid world of book publishing. Maraniss’ own painstakingly researched and well-reviewed biography of Obama was significantly outsold by the nakedly partisan biography The Amateur, which charges Obama with wrecking the economy and being rude to Oprah.

He says reporters striving for objectivity are becoming so hectored by partisan media accusing them of bias that many news outlets have created “fact-checking” teams to insulate them.

It is not hard to find evidence that what we once knew as “facts” have become contestable.

On Thursday, if you wanted a snapshot of the campaign you might have looked at an average of 471 national polls published by The Huffington Post’s pollster (online, left-leaning) to find that Barack Obama was ahead nationally 48.9 per cent to 44.3 per cent.

But what if you were a Republican and those 471 polls didn’t suit your world view? No problem, just head over to UnSkewedPolls.com, where the hosts skew all the polls with a weighting towards Mitt Romney on the basis that the “mainstream media” and its pollsters are biased.

At UnSkewedPolls.com Romney was up by five points on Thursday.

With the success of Fox News on the right and MSNBC on the left, the honest broker CNN has seen its market share plummet and other smaller cable news networks have risen to mimic the partisans Glenn Beck’s The Blaze (right), Al Gore’s Current TV (left).

This year Twitter has allowed people to create their own news feeds by choosing to follow reporters and commentators whose views support their own, increasing the volume in their personalised echo chamber.

Stories, true and false, are being fed into the machine by a loop of wild claims spread via email chains.

David Frum, a former George W. Bush speechwriter who can criticise both sides, said in his Daily Beast blog that to decode Fox you need to see these emails.

He cited Fox host Greg Gutfield’s line that: “Obama is now out of the closet . . . he’s officially gay for class warfare.” This, writes Frum, is a reference to the email meme that Obama is gay. “Fox is only the most visible part of a vast alternative reality. Fox’s coverage of the news cannot be understood in isolation, but only in conjunction with the rest of that system and especially chain emails that do so much to shape the world view of Fox viewers.”

The impact of the polarisation is demonstrable. A survey taken before the 2010 mid-term elections by the University of Maryland’s World Public Opinion project found there were “substantial levels of misinformation” among all daily news consumers, but that those who got their information from Fox were more likely to be misinformed on issues regarding the environment, the impact of the stimulus package and the war on terrorism.

Greater exposure to Fox News increased the degree to which viewers were misinformed.

But viewers of public broadcasting and MSNBC were more likely to (incorrectly) believe that the US Chamber of Commerce was spending money raised from foreign sources to support Republican candidates.

The Pulitzer prize-winning Princeton professor Paul Starr fears there are less tangible but perhaps more consequential impacts of the bipolar American media. He cites research by Diane Muntz that shows that though people tend to be more tolerant when they mix with people with whom they disagree, few encounter opposing positions and those who do become less likely to act politically. This could lead to lower voter turnout.

He also raises research by Cass Sunstein that shows that when groups of like-minded people congregate and speak  as with online  their existing biases tend to grow more extreme.

The echo grows in the chamber rather than fades.

Author: BY NICK O’MALLEY WASHINGTON
Date: 29/09/2012
Words: 1050
Source: AGE