More Choice, Less Uncertainty: The Paradoxical Relationship of Political Identity and News Exposure in the American Public Sphere

Abstract

More Choice, Less Uncertainty: The Paradoxical Relationship of Political Identity and News Exposure in the American Public Sphere Benjamin Gross Introduction Ambiguity is defined as a situation of inexactness, and is synonymous with the feelings of uncertainty and ambivalence. It is a state of mind that one might generally expect to find when discussing complex social and political issues with others, as the causes of and remedies to societal ills is far from being clear to all citizens. Nevertheless, discourse in the United States has become highly polemic in the early twenty‐first century, where the social attitudes of political partisans seem very strong, stable, and virtually impervious to change. These traits reduce the ability to appreciate the presence of ambiguity in the political beliefs held by others. While differing political viewpoints and theoretical assumptions are central to a healthy Democracy, an inability to recognize and validate the varying worldviews held by others is problematic. How has this occurred in a society where there exists a nearly countless amount of mediums for people to collect and share political information? Is it possible that the ability to share and consume information so readily actually reduces ambiguity rather than increases it? Questions such as these have been addressed by a wide variety of scholars in recent years, cutting across all academic disciplines. This article reviews the literature regarding political news media and its relevance to the rise of attitudinal extremity found among the American public. Additionally, new data will be explored that tests whether media selectivity increases feeling of antipathy and blame that self‐identified political partisans hold toward members of the opposing party in the United States. Literature review In the study of media and politics, a central figure that is widely cited among most scholars is Jürgen Habermas, whose concept of a “public sphere” () is still highly influential. He defines a public sphere as any space where individuals can come together to freely discuss & identify societal problems. Under ideal conditions, according to Habermas, this space is characterized by a wide array of perspectives that are being voiced by citizens coming from all walks of life. While such a situation is not feasible with mass mediums, due to the prohibitively high costs to entry and limited space available (such as the time of television broadcasts and length of newspapers), the Internet would seemingly enhance the public sphere. After all, virtually anyone can access the Internet at a minimal cost, and share his/her opinion as widely as they wish across a wide array of platforms. Under such conditions, this Habermasian conception of the public sphere should lead people to feel very optimistic about the prospects for Democracy. With such a vast and diverse collective of information readily available to anyone who goes online to learn about and discuss politics, one would expect that American public opinion regarding political issues would generally be defined by complexity and ambiguity today. If Americans were spending considerably large amounts of time each day online, contemplating both conservative and liberal viewpoints and assumptions about societal conditions as they learn, it should be nearly impossible to avoid feelings of ambivalence regarding these problems. However, more often than not, this does not seem to be the end result for most users. Instead, those who engage in online politics tend to engage in patterns of “selective exposure” (Freedman and Sears ), which is defined by a preference of individuals for attending to information that is likely to confirm their pre‐existing viewpoints. This concept is highly similar to Leon Festinger's () theory of cognitive dissonance, where people actively avoid disconfirming information due to their dislike of feeling uncertainness or ambiguity. Taken together, these serve as possible explanations for why those who use mass and social mediums for political information develop higher levels of certainty and attitudinal extremity over time. The research of Joseph Klapper () was the first to relate self‐selectivity to media exposure for the purpose of understanding social attitudes. What he found was that media content held only limited effects on public opinion. Klapper's results indicated that people had a strong tendency to engage in selective exposure to information when they already held stable beliefs about...