How Partisan Media Polarize America Matthew Levendusky. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2013.Partisan news media are not new in the United States. For much of this nation's history, all news reporting was partisan. Early newspapers took a clear position on issues, siding with Federalists or Anti-Federalists, Whigs or Democrats, and eventually Republicans or Democrats. While the twentieth century saw a shift to objective journalism, partisan media have reemerged in recent years. In How Partisan Media Polarize America, Matthew Levendusky argues that the combination of partisan political news and the modern twenty-four hour news cycle has fundamentally changed the relationship between media, governance, and society.This central thesis leads to several questions. Do partisan media make individuals more polarized? Do partisan media make citizens less likely to trust or cooperate with the other political party? Do partisan media affect voting choices and the way people interpret elections? How do partisan media affect American politics in general? These questions frame Levendusky's research and provide the organizational structure for this book.Levendusky begins by demonstrating the relevance of partisan news media in contemporary society. While the audience of individual cable television programs still remains limited-and leading partisan cable news programs still attract less than half the viewership of the nightly network news broadcasts- ratings trends show that preferences are changing. News consumers are shifting away from traditional news and toward partisan cable news programs that offer heavy doses of analysis and perspective. Such changing preferences, combined with new economic, technological, and regulatory environments, have led to the rise of partisan cable news personalities, like Bill O'Reilly and Rachel Maddow, radio talk show hosts, like Rush Limbaugh and Randi Rhodes, and websites like Town Hall and Daily Kos. While polarized news programs exist across many media today, Levendusky places a special emphasis on cable news networks, and focuses on Fox News, which caters to a Republican and conservative audience, and MSNBC, which caters to a Democratic and liberal audience.After establishing the premise for this research in the first chapter, the book goes on to present data gathered in response to the four research questions. Chapter 2 presents the results of a series of case studies and a comparative analysis of news content during the 2008 presidential election and during the first year of the Obama administration. Chapter 3 explains the implications of partisan news coverage; Chapter 4 presents results from a series of five original experiments; Chapter 5 presents results from an additional three original experiments; Chapter 6 presents results from a new analysis of data from the 2008 National Annenberg Election Study; and Chapter 7 synthesizes and discusses the findings. …