Desegregating the ideological marketplace

Are we talking past each other?

Valdis Krebs has prepared an interesting graphic, a network map of bestselling partisan books purchased at online booksellers. Right-wing and left-wing books are separated and color-coded. Lines are drawn to represent pairings of purchases; if customers tend to buy both Slander and Dude, Where's My Country?, the two books are linked in the chart.

But the same customer does not seem at all likely to buy both Slander and Dude, Where's My Country?. In fact, it seems from the chart that some people buy right-wing books and others buy left-wing books, but very few tend to buy some of both.

I see two ways of looking at this analysis.

On the one hand, we could conclude that today's readers are especially narrow-minded. Every choir member, so to speak, is listening to his own pastor, never hearing what somebody else's minister has to say. Readers limit themselves to the books with which they already agree. Everybody's busily reinforcing his own silly ideas.

On the other hand, it is just barely possible that the problem lies not with the readers, but with the books. It is possible that Slander and Dude, Where's My Country? are the literary equivalent of The Jerry Springer Show. The books themselves make no effort to be circumspect; the pundits writing them are far more partisan than most candidates for office will ever be. They win their case not by discrediting the opposition's arguments but by defacing their opposition with flying vitriol. Readers seeking sound, fair argumentation go elsewhere entirely (unless perhaps they read Coulter for kicks).

I think that these two interpretations are actually compatible. They merely consider different implications of the same facts. Indeed, another interpretation is also possible: conservatives are gaining a greater voice in the popular media, and liberals are countering with material of a comparably lurid nature. The same trend can be seen in the emergence of Fox News, which introduced not only a right-wing perspective but also a kind of playful political roughhouse into television news coverage. This might not be entirely a bad thing; at least now we have a balance of insulting biases instead of merely one orthodoxy.

In any case, each reader is responsible to find his way to more thoughtful fare eventually. If he is unwilling to do so, then at least the conservative marketing is as good as the liberal marketing now.

But really, people. Do you want to be at the mercy of a slick marketing job?