Why We're Polarized

by Ezra Klein

Crucially, the Democratic Party isn’t just more diverse in terms of its members; it’s also more diverse in its trusted information sources. In 2014, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey measuring trust in different media sources, giving respondents thirty-six different outlets to consider and asking them to rate their trust in each. Respondents who counted as “consistent liberals” trusted a wide variety of media outlets ranging from center-right to left: ABC, Al Jazeera America, the BBC, Bloomberg, CBS, CNN, The Colbert Report, Daily Kos, The Daily Show, the Economist, The Ed Schultz Show, Google News, the Guardian, the Huffington Post, Mother Jones, MSNBC, NBC, the New Yorker, the New York Times, NPR, PBS, Politico, Slate, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Yahoo! Consistent conservatives did not. Of the thirty-six outlets named, only a handful of deeply ideological sources commanded more trust than distrust among respondents who counted as consistently conservative: Fox News, Breitbart, the Wall Street Journal, the Blaze, the Drudge Report, The Sean Hannity Show, The Glenn Beck Program, and The Rush Limbaugh Show. Pew also asked consistent liberals and conservatives which outlet served as their “main” news source. Here, too, the difference was stark. For the liberals, there was no dominant news source. CNN was the top choice with 15 percent, followed by NPR with 13 percent, MSNBC with 12 percent, and the New York Times with 10 percent. Amo...