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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (52679)	11/1/2006 7:04:11 PM
From: Cogito	Respond to of 90947

>>If an audience has more moderates than any other group, but has more conservatives than liberals the audience does lean to the conservative side. OTOH an argument could be made against his point by questioning whether being part of the audience for the listed news and opinion sources makes you more informed. Perhaps liberals listen to or read sources not listed on the chart to a greater or lesser extent than conservatives. (although some of the lines on the chart are quite general, and the chart should cover most people). Furthermore conservatives are listed as being a larger part of the general public in the chart than liberals, so you would assume they would be a larger part of a number of the listed audiences. I'm not sure why self identified liberals are (or at least where) so outnumbered by self identified conservatives. Perhaps more relatively liberal people are likely to call themselves moderates. Maybe this is a sign that conservatives have had some success at demonizing the term liberal.<< Tim - Yes, I agree that an audience with a higher percentage of conservatives than liberals, and an even larger one of moderates, could be said to lean conservative. If that had been Bill's original point, I wouldn't have argued it. As for methodology, you can look at the Pew report itself. I believe it was based on self-identification. People chose what to call themselves. I wondered about why there seemed to be more people identifying as conservatives than liberals as well. I think it may have something to do with the success the republican campaigns have had in recent years in making "liberal" some kind of dirty word or epithet. That theory may be supported by more current data. Note that the survey we've all been talking about here was done in May of 2004. Support for the conservative agenda at that time was considerably higher than it is now. At least, support for President Bush and his agenda was a lot higher More recent Pew Research data that I have posted show "independents" and "swing voters" leaning toward the Democrats in 2006, by large margins. It would be interesting to see the results of this same survey for the present time. I agree that an "argument could be made against his point by questioning whether being part of the audience for the listed news and opinion sources makes you more informed." We should also remember that a lot of people would be represented more than once in this data, if they watch more than one TV news program or whatever. Presumably, a person who watches CNN and Fox and the News Hour (for example), while reading various newspapers as well, is more well informed than somebody who sticks mainly with one source. But these data do not account for that at all. - Allen