Archives for 2024

Charts like this one are making the rounds, showing that post-election consumer sentiment has flipped, with Republicans over 100 (positive sentiment) for the first time in a while, and Democrats heading into negative territory.

Anyway, a lot of this is down to Fox News and friends, but even people who read regular media are pretty ignorant of the facts of the economy:

Conservative media, unsurprisingly, appears to be a major culprit in the miseducation of the American public, with people whose primary media source is conservative media registering lower familiarity with reality than those who stuck mainly to other media sources. (Reliance on social media, too, was associated with less knowledge of basic facts.)

But even among those who primarily get their news from the more general category of cable/national newspapers, a third didn’t realize that inflation had declined over the past year. Voters’ lack of knowledge, therefore, cannot simply be laid at the feet of the conservative press. Corporate outlets more broadly must share the blame. […] […] journalists over the past several years have engaged in a collective freak-out over a surge in inflation, feeding the public’s pre-existing negativity bias with a hyper-fixation on rising prices in economic coverage. That this coverage has not only overshadowed coverage of more positive economic stories—such as the successes of a historically progressive stimulus bill, and the massive wage gains it has spurred—but has misled the public about basic economic facts in the process is a scandal.

The whole piece is worth a read because it runs through a few basic reporting errors/biases with mainstream political reporting.

The Stupid EconomyPost + Comments (296)

This is an interesting research article by two political scientists.  Abstract:

American voters consume an astounding amount of entertainment media, yet its political consequences are often neglected. We argue that this ostensibly apolitical content can create unique opportunities for politicians to build parasocial ties with voters. We study this question in the context of Donald Trump’s unconventional political trajectory and investigate the electoral consequences of The Apprentice. Using an array of data—content analysis, surveys, Twitter data, open-ended answers—we investigate how this TV program helped Trump brand himself as a competent leader and foster viewers’ trust in him. Exploiting the geographic variation in NBC channel inertia, we find that exposure to The Apprentice increased Donald Trump’s electoral performance in the 2016 Republican primary. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of the rise of nonconventional politicians in this golden age of entertainment.

I don’t know how to evaluate their research methodology, but I sure think Trump’s Apprentice stardom isn’t given enough weight by the political press.  For instance, the huge effort they put into creating a Ron DeSantis boomlet, which fizzled the moment that people actually saw what a stiff that guy is, shows that it’s Trump himself, not just Trump’s authoritarianism, that powers Trump’s appeal.  As far as I’m concerned, that’s good news for Democrats, because some zero charisma stiff who is “a competent Trump” is going to have a harder time with low information voters, simply because of the groundwork laid by Trump’s reality show stardom.

As the authors point out in the paper, the way TV was watched during the time of the Apprentice, which mostly pre-dated streaming, is quite different from the way that people watch TV today.  Maybe someone like Joe Rogan is as close a parallel to Trump’s Apprentice audience.  According to the paper, the Apprentice had 28.1 million viewers at its peak of popularity.  As of this Spring, Rogan had 14.5 followers on Spotify, and 16.4 YouTube followers and 18.9 million Instagram followers.

The Apprentice FactorPost + Comments (76)