Dr. Charles Murray, a political scientist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, came to Middlebury last Thursday to discuss his book Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. … But when Murray was introduced, the student crowd erupted in a barrage of chants and sign-waving designed to […] Read more »
Study: Breitbart-led right-wing media ecosystem altered broader media agenda
… Our own study of over 1.25 million stories published online between April 1, 2015 and Election Day shows that a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world. This […] Read more »
Things look bleak for liberals now. But they’ll beat Trump in the end.
Is Donald Trump the end for the left? Is it really possible, as a baby boom voter averred in an interview last month with The Washington Post, that “all the things we cared about for the past 40 years could be wiped out in the first 100 days”? … Trump […] Read more »
Progressive protesters face longer odds than the Tea Party did
… In February 2016, using a representative sample of 725 California residents, we conducted a survey experiment to see if liberals and conservatives view protests differently, and how those attitudes might be conditioned by the ideological goals of particular social movements. A few studies have shown that conservatives hold protesters […] Read more »
How the Internet Threatens Democracy
As the forces of reaction outpace movements predicated on the ideal of progress, and as traditional norms of political competition are tossed aside, it’s clear that the internet and social media have succeeded in doing what many feared and some hoped they would. They have disrupted and destroyed institutional constraints […] Read more »
Choose Your News: How Viewers of Different News Outlets See Trump
The proliferation of media outlets has long meant that, with the click of a remote control or a mouse, Americans can choose their news. In the Trump era, that means that different media consumers are experiencing different realities when it comes to the presidency and the state of the country. […] Read more »