Hyperpartisanship and Media Hype

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/30/opinion/hyperpartisanship-and-media-hype.html

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To the Editor:

Re “Partisanship Is the Real Story Behind the Fake News” (The Upshot, Jan. 12):

To some degree, partisanship is a media creation. While it is true that partisan polarization has increased, the increase occurs primarily among the most extreme ideological partisans, not the bulk of the public.

A University of Pennsylvania political scientist, Matthew Levendusky, has recently shown that individuals mistakenly perceive the public to be more politically divided than it actually is.

When you get beyond the recent presidential election and look at contentious political issues like abortion and gun control, you find considerable agreement among Americans on common-sense solutions, as shown in your Jan. 10 Upshot article (“Where Experts and Public Agree on Limited Gun Deaths”) that found overwhelming support for background checks on gun purchases.

News that emphasizes partisan divides between staunch Democrats, who lambaste fake news stories about Hillary Clinton, and Republicans, who castigate BuzzFeed’s posting unsubstantiated claims about Donald Trump, fuels partisans’ perceptions that the country is polarized, to some degree creating that very reality.

RICHARD M. PERLOFF

Cleveland

The writer is a professor of communication, psychology and political science at Cleveland State University.