The Right-Wing Media Bubble
But he also shows that the conservative media is much smaller and weaker than many conservatives think. What’s more, the habits and practices of conservative media serve to tell its audience what it wants to hear, which often results in a false picture of the world
.. [T]he Right’s media monoculture has created negative feedback loops whereby people with little political acumen like Mark Levin, Michael Savage, and Glenn Beck are able to fill Republican voters’ heads with nonsensical ideas like planning to shut down the government with no backup plan or electing fewer GOP officeholders in pursuit of more “pure” ones, primarily because they grossly overestimate the number of conservatives in America.
.. Conservatives and America as a whole are poorer intellectually because of this. While center-right individuals might not always fall in line for a policy battle, having large numbers of journalists who are willing to be skeptical of all sides would be a very good thing as both Left and Right need close scrutiny. Republican elites are now paying the price for refusing to subject the consultants who advise them to the skepticism they deserved.
The seeming success of Fox News and talk radio has made many conservatives think they now have a massive media empire. In truth, they have constructed an intellectual ghetto that no one else wants to visit.
.. Polls show that most Americans do not trust Hillary Clinton. But I don’t think most Americans regard her as so beyond-the-pale horrible that it justifies voting for someone as unstable and weird as Donald Trump.