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EP 05 The Quasi-Religion of Right-Wing Media with Marcus Mann

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In this episode, Sage, Julius, and Hanna sit down with Purdue sociology professor Marcus Mann to discuss why polarization is the wrong framework for understanding our news media. Marcus explains that there are qualitative differences between right-wing and center-left news ecosystems. He argues that where center-left news reporting is largely focused on information dissemination, we can better understand right-wing media if we view it as a quasi-religious phenomenon marked by personality-centered programming, community-building, and defining in-groups and out-groups. Marcus gets into the reasons behind these differences in epistemologies between news reporting and opinion programming, suggests evaluating media by function and funding, and urges seeking social connection beyond political media.


Key Takeaways from Marcus:

  1. Media ecosystems on the right and left are different. 
  2. The "left needs to find a Joe Rogan" argument misses the point. 
  3. Think about function and funding when evaluating media sources. 


Find out more about:


Some of the texts we refer to in this episode:


Marcus’ Media Diet:

Meat and potatoes: New York Times, Associated Press, Reuters, and NPR

Junk Food/Palate Cleanser: Barstool Sports

This podcast is part of CAPT’s efforts to encourage open and diverse intellectual exchange. The ideas presented by individuals on the podcast are their own and do not represent Purdue University, which adheres to a policy of institutional neutrality.

We would love to hear your thoughts on this episode! Send us feedback to captivatedpod@gmail.com

In this episode, Sage, Julius, and Hanna sit down with Purdue sociology professor Marcus Mann to discuss why polarization is the wrong framework for understanding our news media. Marcus explains that there are qualitative differences between right-wing and center-left news ecosystems. He argues that where center-left news reporting is largely focused on information dissemination, we can better understand right-wing media if we view it as a quasi-religious phenomenon marked by personality-centered programming, community-building, and defining in-groups and out-groups. Marcus gets into the reasons behind these differences in epistemologies between news reporting and opinion programming, suggests evaluating media by function and funding, and urges seeking social connection beyond political media.


Key Takeaways from Marcus:

  1. Media ecosystems on the right and left are different. The language of “polarization” can wrongly suggest they are functionally the same. But center-left media focuses on information dissemination, while right-wing media builds community, reinforces shared identity, and defines in-groups and out-groups — much like a quasi-religious phenomenon. 
  2. The "left needs to find a Joe Rogan" argument misses the point. The Democratic coalition is fundamentally more diverse — racially, religiously, and ideologically — than the Republican one. This means the media project for the left is inherently harder. A single charismatic voice can't speak to such a varied audience the way it can to a more homogenous one, so chasing that strategy is likely a dead end for Democrats.
  3. Think about function and funding when evaluating media sources. Asking "how does this outlet make its money?" and “is this trying to inform me, or trying to make me feel anger, fear, or tribal loyalty?” are some of the most practical tools for assessing whether a source is genuinely trying to inform you or simply trying to keep you hooked.


Find out more about:


Some of the texts we refer to in this episode:


Marcus’ Media Diet:

Meat and potatoes: New York Times, Associated Press, Reuters, and NPR

Junk Food/Palate Cleanser: Barstool Sports


Transcript:

[00:00:00] Marcus Mann: 

Center-left media news reporting is just basically, almost exclusively about information dissemination, whereas right-wing media is really like building communities and building shared understandings and appealing to specific identities and defining in-groups and defining out-groups, right? Which is something that people have always done.  

[00:00:26] Sage Goodwin: 

Welcome to another episode of CAPTivated, a new podcast hosted by the Center for American Political History, Media, and Technology at Purdue University. In each episode, we will examine a specific facet of our digital public sphere, how it works, and how we got here. We are here to help you sort through the noise. I'm Sage. 

[00:00:44] Julius Freeman: 

I'm Julius.

[00:00:45] Hanna Sistek: 

And I'm Hanna. 

On today's podcast, we are very fortunate to be joined by one of our CAPT faculty fellows, Marcus Mann. Marcus is an assistant professor in sociology here at Purdue, where he studies how conflicting knowledge authorities affect individuals' perceptions of the world. In this episode, Marcus talked about the concept of asymmetric polarization.

He also explained how we can better understand the right-wing media ecosystem, we should stop trying to think about it in the same way as the center-left media ecosystem, and rather think about it as a quasi-religious phenomenon. 

[00:01:21] Sage Goodwin:  

Marcus made some really interesting points about how on the right, the audiences are becoming more and more similar, whereas the left is trying to appeal to a very diverse set of people, which means they're engaged in fundamentally different projects in producing media.

[00:01:34] Julius Freeman: 

I will say that if you enjoyed our conversation with Dr. Nicole Hemmer, this episode is a great extension of that discussion.

[00:01:41] Sage Goodwin: 

We started by asking Marcus about the journey that led him to where he is today. 

[00:01:45] Marcus Mann: 

It started in religion, actually. I became interested in atheism a little after graduating from my undergraduate degree at UMass Amherst. If you guys remember in the early aughts, there was the new atheist movement. Are you guys familiar with this at all? 

[00:02:00] Sage Goodwin: 

Is it Richard Dawkins, right?

[00:02:02] Marcus Mann: 

And Hitchens and Dennett and Sam Harris and those guys, they all released these books that were…

[00:02:07] Sage Goodwin: 

The God Delusion.

[00:02:08] Marcus Mann: 

The God Delusion. Yes, and Breaking the Spell, and all these really are bestselling books. And it was a movement. I was newly graduated, and I just gobbled them up, and I became a really ardent atheist as a young man, and I got really into it. And that kind of enthusiasm eventually… I saw a little bit of the movement's inner workings, its variation, and the different things that drew different people to it. And I was exposed to some, not very pretty things, among some of the thinkers in that movement in other places. And it turned into more of an academic interest in terms of where movements like this come from? What leads to pretty large groups of people dismissing a certain authority at the same time, in this case, religious authority? So that brought me to religious studies. I studied atheist communities in the triangle in North Carolina for my thesis from a religious studies program at Duke University. And in that program, I did qualitative research, interviewing folks, doing ethnography, and, again, continued to dig into the different reasons people came to communities like that and the different religious traditions they were leaving. But it turned into a more general interest in knowledge authorities themselves, not just in religion. And another place we see a lot of conflicting knowledge authorities, obviously in politics, which is what I'm studying now.

[00:03:34] Sage Goodwin: 

Super interesting. So, that classic entry into academia, how do I understand the thing that happened to me?

[00:03:41] Marcus Mann: 

Yeah, I'm one of those people who thinks all research is me search, right? We all have a personal story like that. 

[00:03:47] Sage Goodwin: 

So you've started thinking a lot more about the sociology around politics. I feel like in the last, I guess 5, 10, maybe even more than that. The kind of buzzword that everyone talks about a lot, the thing that seems to be the problem with politics today, is polarization. The problem with communication between the parties is that we're all just so polarized. The internet and the fragmented media landscape have polarized us. And fundamentally, the problem is that we just can't talk across the aisle. How would you define polarization?

[00:04:22] Marcus Mann: 

So, 20, 30 years… Sociologists, political scientists, and other social scientists have observed divergences across various measures between self-described Democrats and Republicans in the United States. Defining it is hard. There are all different kinds, right? So people are dividing along opinion, policy beliefs, how Republicans think about Democrats, and how Democrats feel about and think about Republicans. We call that affective polarization. So there's not one…

[00:04:51] Sage Goodwin: 

Wait, so affective polarization is how they feel about each other?

[00:04:55] Marcus Mann: 

Right. Leaving all the opinions aside. To what degree do Republicans hate Democrats, and to what degree do Democrats hate Republicans? And we have survey research dating back quite a long way that shows this is one of the most secular, stable trends in polarization. And, probably the most disturbing, because it's gotten quite extreme. And if you have that kind of outgroup animosity, the implications are pretty dire. So that's another kind of polarization, which is also fairly symmetrical between Republicans and Democrats.

[00:05:26] Sage Goodwin: 

They both hate each other the same way. 

[00:05:28] Marcus Mann: 

And increasingly so at similar rates. So polarization is a thing, right? We're seeing it happen in real time between the parties, but it's also much more complex than just people becoming more extreme. There's a lot of work in political science, for example, that shows polarization is less driven by people changing than by people sorting themselves into the Republican and Democratic parties. So the composition of the parties has changed. So liberals over the past 30 years, maybe more than that, have been sorting themselves into the Democratic party and conservatives into the Republican party. So, without anyone really changing their views, the parties can become more ideologically homogenous and more extreme. 

I think that explains most of the problems we're having because when you have more homogenous parties, Republican politicians have less of an incentive to speak across the aisle and vice versa. 

[00:06:22] Hanna Sistek: 

So, previously, maybe those folks used to switch parties a little more often, be independent, or something, and now they're more starkly partisan.

[00:06:32] Sage Goodwin: 

Yeah. Or there was some more common ground baked in because people weren't so homogenous. There were more differences that they were more used to navigating. 

[00:06:39] Marcus Mann: 

Right, they would vote across the aisle more. They had more diverse constituencies, especially when you're talking about primaries. Today, if you're a Democrat in a primary or a Republican in a primary, you're campaigning for the most extreme folks in your constituency. And so it had this ongoing effect.

[00:06:58] Hanna Sistek: 

So recently you've been trying to complicate this discussion around polarization, calling it out, saying that, “Hey, actually this is not a symmetrical phenomenon. We see a lot of asymmetry here.” Can you talk a little more about that? 

[00:07:13] Marcus Mann: 

Yeah. So, I think good company here among other social scientists, there are folks in political science saying this, “folks in communications”. I focus particularly on political media. I think this is definitely the case in political media: polarization, as a paradigm, a concept, or a way of talking about these things, falls short in many ways.

So the first thing is when people hear the word polarization, they probably imagine two ions kind of symmetrically distancing or something like that, right? And that's not what we're seeing. There's a lot of asymmetry in measures of polarization. But more importantly, democrats and liberals, and on the other side, Republicans and conservatives, are just qualitatively different in so many important ways. And there are so many important dynamics at play that this idea of two parties getting more extreme doesn't do those nuances justice. I'll give an example from my research and political media. Something that I think a lot of people are aware of at this point, because it's gotten a lot of media coverage in recent months or years, is that the right-wing media ecosystem is way larger and much more robust and commands a lot more audience share than the left-wing media ecosystem, which is compared to the right-wing media ecosystem, is kind of non-existent. And so the concept of polarization elides those important asymmetries and differences.

[00:08:36] Sage Goodwin: 

That's super interesting, especially when we think about those calls that you sometimes hear, from people on the left saying, “Well, we just need our version of Joe Rogan.” The left just doesn't have these, like particular people that draw these large audiences, and that would be the solution. So, can you tell us a little bit about what some of those differences are? 

[00:08:57] Marcus Mann: 

There are a lot of differences. But something I come back to all the time is the classic book by Grossman and Hopkins, Asymmetric Politics: Ideological Republicans and Group Interest Democrats. But the general idea, based on a lot of research and political science, is that since the major party realignments in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, Republicans have been able to consolidate southern evangelical conservatives into their coalition.

The Republican party has just become a lot more homogenous in a lot of different ways than the Democrat party. The Republican party is ideologically really homogenous. They've managed to consolidate conservatives right across the country. Mm-hmm. It's become more racially homogenous than the Democrat party. Ethnically homogenous and religiously homogenous. So they have like a pretty tight group of folks at their base. At the same time, the opposite has happened to Democrats: they have become a looser coalition, racially and religiously diverse, and diverse on many other measures as well.

So from a media perspective, you can speak more directly to the kind of coalition the Republicans have, so there's a lot more agreement there. Ideologically, there's a lot more shared history. There are many more shared values; it's much harder on the Democratic side. There's a lot more. Heterogeneity, like I said, different beliefs. People from different histories and backgrounds. And so, for them, the project is much harder than I think the one on the right is.

[00:10:28] Marcus Mann: 

So this was an NYT article. Finding the left Joe Rogan, I think, is probably a hill. You don't wanna try and climb up? I don't think it's possible, but I do think it's worth thinking about if you're a Democratic strategist, for example, and you have a different project in mind, given that understanding.

[00:10:47] Sage Goodwin: 

And how you're appealing to your audience is working differently. Like, a fundamental project of getting people to engage with your ideas is different if your audience is homogenous. Versus if it's made up with a whole bunch of different people. In terms of political media, the left and the right are engaged actually on just two different projects, which brings us to a really interesting article that you wrote about how maybe this idea of polarization is keeping us from better understanding, actually, the sociology of what is happening in terms of political media on the right. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about that article? 

[00:11:23] Marcus Mann: 

Sure. With my co-author, Dan Winchester, a sociologist of religion, this is what we call a theory article in the business. So this article is not very empirical, but it's built on a lot of prior empirical research. And it's basically an argument for, “Hey, let's rethink how we are framing this issue.” And perhaps an article like that will help people conduct different kinds of research in the future, so I wanna make it clear that the article includes some anecdotal examples that use empirical data.

[00:11:56] Sage Goodwin: 

When we say empirical data, what are we talking about? 

[00:11:58] Marcus Mann: 

You know, having actually gone through data collection in the form of, for sociologists, it could be computational, data scraped from Twitter or Facebook or, or whatever it might be, or survey research, or interviews, or something like that. So there was no original data collection. 

[00:12:10] Sage Goodwin: 

Right. So it's like a meta thing that you're doing, you're taking other people's… 

[00:12:14] Marcus Mann: 

Yes. It's partly, yeah. It's partly reviewing older research and then saying, "Hey, based on this body of work, maybe we should think about this differently." So that's what we decided to do. And again, Dan's a sociologist of religion. In the article we build on, extensive research has been conducted at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard and MIT by a couple of great researchers there, especially Yoi Bankler, who has led much of that work, and this is years of empirical data on online media ecosystems.

And in that research, they show basically what we talked about before, how large and robust the right-wing media ecosystem has become, and how influential and how there's no equivalent on the left. So the two areas where the most attention is given in the media ecosystem among audiences are the center-left and the far right.

The center-right is pretty mellow, and the far left is pretty mellow; there's not a lot of action going on there. But more importantly, in our article, we point out the qualitative differences between these two spaces. This is an audio medium, so you can't hear me do air quotes, but I'm air-quoting "center left" here because how ideology is operationalized in these studies is up for debate.

In that space are big networks like ABC, NBC, the New York Times, the Associated Press, and similar outlets. You know, large organizations that employ a lot of journalists who are doing a lot of news reporting, just straight news reporting. Right. But then on the far right, it's very different. It's a lot more opinion programming and kind of responding to news that's already been broken. The article argues that using the term "polarization" or that frame doesn't do that qualitative difference justice. Two fundamentally different things are happening here.

And then we use the term "quasi-religious phenomenon" because many of the dynamics we examine on the far right, or have been shown in those ecosystems, mimic findings in the sociology of religion for decades now. A few examples of that.

So in the sociology of religion, in an area of research called church sect studies, it's been shown that, if you're a smaller sect, by the way, a sect is just a word for a smaller kind of religious organization compared to a church, which tends to be larger and more accommodating. What's been shown in this church sect research and in religion that goes back a long time is that churches that become a little too big, a little too friendly with the secular world, and a little too accommodating might. Diversify their congregations to a point where people are feeling a little less, 

[00:14:51] Hanna Sistek: 

Connected 

[00:14:51] Marcus Mann: 

Solidarity, a little less connected. They might lose congregants to a sect. So a sect might split off to regain some of that authenticity, that intimacy. And, they're able to generate more of a kind of religious energy.

[00:15:05] Hanna Sistek: 

And they could cater to a more specific audience. 

[00:15:08] Marcus Mann: 

To a more specific audience.

That's right. And we make the argument that we're witnessing the same thing in a lot of right-wing media. We use Fox News reporting as an example, if you guys remember this. Joe Biden won Arizona in the 2020 election. And they were the first network to do it. It was their news reporting division that reported it. And they got a lot of criticism pretty much right away for doing it among their audience, during that time. Newsmax was able to eat into their audience share pretty quickly. And we see this in data from Facebook and other social media platforms: Fox News lost engagement pretty quickly after they made that call, because they…

[00:15:46] Hanna Sistek: 

Did too quickly, remind me 'cause I don't remember.

[00:15:50] Marcus Mann: 

Basically, because they were the first network to do it, there were already narratives of voter fraud happening. And it just, I think, for a lot of audience members, it felt like a betrayal.

[00:16:00] Hanna Sistek: 

Because it should have been Trump winning it, right? So they...

[00:16:02] Marcus Mann: 

I think a lot of the audience did not believe it was true. I mean, calling Arizona at that time was like calling the election. So after that happened, there was a lot of reshuffling at Fox News. They got rid of a lot of the people, or people quit, who worked in the news division that were responsible for calling the election that way. And they were able to recover and regain their audience share after that.

But that kind of dynamic where a smaller firm can eat into the audience of a larger firm by maintaining, kind of orthodoxy in a certain way. In this case, the narrative of election fraud, which Newsmax did. We don't see that on the left as much because, again, audience attention is mainly focused on larger firms that are primarily doing news reporting rather than opinion programs. So that's a qualitative difference. We try to point out our article.

[00:16:47] Hanna Sistek: 

So why do you think there's less of a need for opinion programming on the left? 

[00:16:51] Marcus Mann: 

I think there are two answers to that question. The first one is that there's not, so the left, Danal Young has a great book about this, about how opinion programming on the left has mainly taken the form of comedy shows… 

[00:17:06] Hanna Sistek: 

Irony outrage. 

[00:17:08] Marcus Mann: 

Comedy shows in the form of, you know, or satire. I mean, just turn on SNL, and you're gonna get a lot of progressive commentary on political events. The Daily Show. John Oliver. 

[00:17:19] Sage Goodwin: 

Yeah. All the late-night hosts.

[00:17:20] Marcus Mann: 

Right. Exactly. All the late-night hosts. So it's, it's manifesting differently on the left. Watch the Oscars. It's a progressive love fest, right? So, the left or progressives are not above needing that kind of energy, or that kind of opinion content. I think pop culture in general has been captured by progressive values to a certain degree.

That's putting it in pretty strong terms, but I think that's generally true when I say that. So yeah, it's manifesting differently. What's different about the political right is that it's manifesting in an explicitly political context. So it's in the political media that this is happening. And it's gotten in the way of news reporting, which I think presents an issue. 

[00:18:01] Sage Goodwin: 

So, because the right doesn't see, or people who identify with the right aren't feeling catered to, they need to create these spaces in a completely different way. Like the left has a pressure valve, which is mainstream entertainment. 

[00:18:16] Marcus Mann: 

I think that's right. And by the way, we're firmly in the realm here of speculating and generating hypotheses, which is what I think we're doing here. But that's what I think is going on. You said pressure valve. I think that's right. There's been this kind of valve on the political left through pop culture that has allowed more emotional energy to be kind of let out. And yeah, I think the left has the luxury of having pop culture to do that. Whereas that has not been the case with the political right in the country. And so it's being expressed and has been expressed since. For a long time, I was gonna say Limbaugh, but even before that. In explicitly political arguments and programming.

[00:18:53] Hanna Sistek: 

So you're saying that that emotional energy gets a political expression on the right. Is it also that the mainstream media leans a little left, so they feel like it's sort of unfair towards them, and they wanna have their own programming? How much is that part of the equation here?

[00:19:12] Marcus Mann: 

Yeah, the idea that the kinds of outlets I just mentioned, like the Associated Press, for example, or the big legacy networks, lean Left. That's, in the eye of the beholder, to a certain degree. I happen to think that doing journalism seems really hard, and trying to report the facts while maintaining the reputation of objectivity seems really hard.

I'm not sure, I think that in terms of the news reporting on those networks, so here's something interesting, I'll bring NPR into it too. In terms of the news reporting on those networks, I think they've been doing a pretty good job for the past few decades. I'm not sure I would say they “lean left”.

However, when the news is over on NBC or NPR, you are likely to come across programming that is quite diverse. And, on NBC, you might come across a sitcom where the protagonist is a gay couple, NPR might do a story on trans rights, or something like that. That's when I think those platforms get the reputation of leaning left or leaning right. And I think that's an important distinction. 

[00:20:18] Hanna Sistek: 

So there are organizations that do media bias ratings, like all sites. And if we just look at their media bias chart here, NPR, Time, ABC News, CNN, all those are considered to be leaning left. The New Yorker is far left. I mean, so some of those organizations you just mentioned are actually by all sites, standards are left-leaning.

[00:20:43] Marcus Mann: 

Yeah, they're wrong. So I know the chart you're referring to; it has the Associated Press on the far left, which is absolutely ridiculous. If you look into their methodology, they try to perform objectivity by doing kind of crowdsource voting kind of system. And the Associated Press only became far left the day after Donald Trump attacked them for reporting the news. Interesting, interesting. So, in terms of their actual journalistic practices, they're absolutely not far left. So, hey, you know, the methodology of these things is really important. 

[00:21:19] Sage Goodwin: 

Methodology matters. 

[00:21:20] Marcus Mann: 

Methodology matters. Yeah. So, be careful out there, I guess. 

[00:21:25] Sage Goodwin: 

But I think you raised a really important point about the relationship between news and entertainment and how those two spheres operate, in relation to each other, and that's kind of what you're saying on the right, because they're not seeing their views being espoused in the entertainment sphere. They have to go and create their own ways. Making their views heard. 

[00:21:51] Marcus Mann: 

Yeah. And, I think, if you're on the political left, I would like to see more folks be a little bit more honest about that, to be honest with you, because I think progressive folks or folks on the left need to, I don't wanna speak for everybody here, but need to admit that Pop culture largely has been captured by those values. Hollywood, if you wanna put it in those terms, most professors are liberal, right?

And have liberal values, and that's been established through a number of studies. And so the conservative critique that universities and media have become left-leaning or liberal is correct. Where things get a little bit more interesting and messy is questions about the degree to which this has affected actual news reporting and the degree to which it has affected actual research and education in universities.

And I think that's a lot harder to establish. But, going back to the conversation about right-wing media and its kind of dominance, that dominance to me is a manifestation of that energy having to go somewhere. And again, it's these explicitly political contexts where, because of the lack of gatekeeping and barriers in social media these days, there's the potential for more misinformation, disinformation, things like that.

[00:23:05] Sage Goodwin: 

So, going back to this idea in your article, the Frame to understand right-wing media is as quasi-religious. Are there any other ways that manifested?

[00:23:15] Marcus Mann: 

Yeah. So we kind of touched on it. And, there are other researchers, such as Sarah O'Brien and John Barry, who wrote a book called Outrage Media a while ago now, that talks about the prevalence of outrage media. And to be very clear, there's outrage media on the left and the right, but it's important to point out the really large asymmetry where it's much more successful on the right. , But in this kind of media, you do see things like fan clubs and the importance of engagement with the personalities that are part of these, outrage sources 

[00:23:47] Sage Goodwin: 

Like the charismatic leaders. 

[00:23:49] Marcus Mann: 

Yeah, it's much more charismatic. The way they put it in their book is, there's NBC news, no matter who's at the desk, right? It's NBC News, but there's no Bill O'Reilly show without Bill O'Reilly. There's no Sean Hannity show without Sha Hannity.

So it's much more personality-centered, and so we see that much more in that ecosystem than in the center-left, news-reporting ecosystem we talked about. And going back to the sociology of religion, something that's very important in a religious context is something that bears witness to your community and to have moments where you are doing that with the other community members. So. In a religious context. This could be a church service or any kind of religious service where you are getting together with people who share values, and you're feeling that energy.

And so we see much more of that kind of activity on the political right? There's much less of that activity on the political left because again, there's a lot less political left in general.

[00:24:38] Hanna Sistek: 

You know, that's very interesting. One thing that I've really thought about since moving to the United States is it's more religious here, you know, I grew up in Sweden, is also how many people actually go to church and how that is, uh, social point, community, engagement thing that, that really doesn't exist on the left in the same way, at least, you know, I think of people going to church as more conservative. I don’t know how this plays in, but it is just something that came up for me. 

[00:25:06] Marcus Mann: 

No, I think that's super important and something, based on everything we've talked about so far, that we need to be focused on a lot more is this energy we're talking about that's being channeled through these explicit media programs.

And I just wanna say real quick, just because we're noticing with the data we have that the right-wing media ecosystem is a lot larger than the left-wing media ecosystem, doesn't mean that might not change tomorrow. And so, there are these attempts to build a more robust left-wing media ecosystem, and there seems to be some success.

I don't know if you guys have heard of the Midas Touch Empire, which is being built. So, I think it's mainly podcasts, but it's experiencing some success, and I think it's challenging Joe Rogan's status on podcasts a little bit in terms of the kinds of numbers they're getting. So I just wanna point that out real quick. But, to go to your point about community, historically, the way folks enacted community and built social capital in the United States was through religious communities, right? Through churches and things like that. And that's very, very, very important. And if we're noticing that people are finding that through political media on their phones, that's a problem, right?

Because that just perpetuates the difference in division, among folks who are, you know, living in the same neighborhood and living in the same communities. So I think that addressing that is probably an important part of the puzzle. What are the kinds of changes we can make to get people to engage with their local communities more, to get out more, to feel that collective effervescence, I mentioned before, to feel that in real life, right?

That's a big problem and a big question. I don't have the answer to that. But if political media through our phones is our source of connection, that's a road we should probably stop going down; we need to find that somewhere else. I think that's a really important part of it.

[00:26:52] Hanna Sistek: 

In this article, you also point out how Episte episte, uh, these two different media types, the mainstream versus the right-wing, are different. So they have different epistemologies. Can you just like walk us through that a little bit more? Because that part I was really interested in, I thought. 

[00:27:10] Marcus Mann: 

Yeah. So, we go through three major categories where we see differences between center-left media and right-wing media. And we talk about the functional, which is that they're doing different things, right?

The center-left media news reporting is just basically, almost exclusively about information dissemination, whereas the right-wing media is really like building communities and building shared understandings and appealing to specific identities and defining in-groups and defining out-groups, right? Which is something that people have always done. And then you talk about epistemology, which is different ways of knowing. So, going back a long time, the way of knowing the epistemology of center media, and news reporting has been based on journalistic norms like fact-based reporting bylines, trained journalists having a certain kind of education.

[00:28:00] Hanna Sistek: 

Double-checking. 

[00:28:01] Marcus Mann: 

Fact-checking, double-checking, something you're familiar with, right? All these things that you're trained to do. Whereas, it's not the same in right-wing media ecosystems, which are more opinion-based, which is an epistemology based on shared identity, shared values. If it abides by the values the group holds, then it's probably right. It's a different kind of knowing than an institutional, bureaucratized fact-checking kind of system. 

[00:28:26] Hanna Sistek: 

Yeah. So thinking about that, I'm really curious, one thing that I keep thinking about is like, where are the differences really coming from, these differences in the different media ecosystems that you are talking about? Is it something about personality, between liberals and conservatives, that they're different? Is it about social identity? What, where do we see the differences originate? 

[00:28:50] Marcus Mann: 

I think so, like going back to what we were talking about before, that a lot of it is historically contingent, right? The way the party coalitions have changed and realigned is a big part of it. Both of them are becoming more ideologically homogenous, but especially on the right, right? So I really think that's a big part of it. There's a lot more fertile soil. In terms of shared religious identity, specific shared ideology, shared ethnic identity on the political right, to appeal to those things, and make those folks feel like a part of a pretty unified collective through certain kinds of media. And those are opportunities. I just think because of the way the coalitions have been formed, they are much less available on the political left because you have to speak across so much more diverse racial and religious and values and things. You know, on the political left, I think that's the most important part of it. That said, there is research in psychology about moral foundations. Maybe some folks have heard of John. He's a pretty popular social psychologist.

[00:29:53] Hanna Sistek: 

NYU. 

[00:29:55] Marcus Mann: 

He points out that, you know, across cultures, liberals and conservatives have different kinds of taste buds. Different kinds of moral taste buds, and that might have something to do with it, too. And then there's other research in psychology about openness to experience. Authoritarian tendencies, things like that, where they find systematic differences between liberals and conservatives across different kinds of contexts. And I think those are important, and I think they're all contributing to one explanation. Right. I think the nature of the coalitions and how they've just kind of manifested is the biggest part of the puzzle here. 

[00:30:28] Sage Goodwin: 

Okay. So we've had a really interesting conversation here about the differences between the right and the left ecosystems that are very much different in kind, in terms of thinking about. Kind of solutions for people trying to navigate the information ecosystem out there. More critically, does your research speak to any kind of tips or tricks, or any bigger picture solutions that we should be thinking about? 

[00:30:56] Marcus Mann: 

No. There is a lot of research out there that's intervention-based, a lot of research on misinformation and disinformation, and debunking bad information or pre-debunking.

[00:31:12] Sage Goodwin: 

Wait, what is pre-bunking? 

[00:31:14] Marcus Mann: 

It's getting people to think about the potential of misinformation, essentially, in certain contexts, before they're presented with information. And it seems to be quite effective in certain contexts. I'm less in that kind of space than some other folks. But I think, if we're gonna go back to Dan in my paper and our attention to the qualitative differences between these two different media ecosystems, and our argument that we should pay more attention to those things. I think that's the message, right? Is to get folks to be a little bit more attuned to the kind of information they're listening to.

A little bit more attuned to, am I listening to straight news reporting? Or is this opinion programming, attuned to, to what degree, a certain source is trying to appeal to other identities I might have? Another way to put that is to get people to think more about the function of the media source that they're listening to think kind of critically, what do they want their audiences to feel or what do they want their audiences to do? If it's anything other than, get some verifiable information, then that might be something of a red flag.

Another thing, and this is cliché at this point, maybe to say, but to pay attention to is, where, what the funding sources are of the media sources you're listening to, how they're making their money. If they're giving you news and then trying to sell you a wellness product right after, you know, that might also be a little bit of a red flag, right? Jonathan Ladd is a political scientist who, I really, I really like his work and has been pretty vocal for a while now about, how publicly funded media, tends to do a pretty good job at news reporting and avoiding bias and avoiding kind of the pitfalls of resorting to different types of media strategies that are meant to sell advertisements and just get engagement.

[00:32:54] Sage Goodwin: 

So think about the money. 

[00:32:56] Marcus Mann: 

Yeah. Think about the money and think about the function. What are they trying to make you feel? And what is it that they're really selling?

[00:33:02] Sage Goodwin: 

Okay. So if our listeners wanted the quick TLDR three takeaways of what we've been talking about today and your work more broadly, what would those be?

[00:33:11] Marcus Mann: 

Yeah, so I think I wanna package the first two together, if that's okay. The first two would be to pay attention to the difference in degree in kind between different media sources if you're trying to evaluate information. So the language of polarization just, again, makes us think of this symmetrical distancing between two sides.

The assumption being they're kind of functionally the same. So I would say, the, the size and. Features of Right Wing news compared to Center Left News are completely different, right? And if you pay attention to those qualitative differences, I think you're in a better position to accurately assess those ecosystems themselves. So that would be the first two, again, the degree and kind of these media sources. And then the third one is that, using political media as your medium of identity, or social connection, is probably a bad path to go down. As cliché as it sounds, to address this kind of political division or to try and have a more realistic grasp of what's going on in your own life and your own identity.

If we can all put down our phones a little bit more and do whatever we can. I know it's very difficult. Find that social connection in contexts that aren't about politics. Find social connection in contexts that aren't fundamentally about division and these things that usually divide us. And this goes for the left and the right, the political sources that are making the most money and having the most success are the ones that are the most divisive. So, I think that would be my third takeaway. 

[00:34:49] Sage Goodwin: 

Yeah. I kind of like that as a way of thinking slightly differently about that saying that we have of touching grass, like getting us back. Work from your phone. Exactly. But it's not, it's not just touching grass, it's like going to touch grass with someone else. Go find someone. 

[00:35:03] Marcus Mann: 

And then touch grass. There's, you know, that stuff sells. It's really powerful, and it's very, very engaging. And I think it's a pretty powerful political statement to ignore it.

[00:35:15] Hanna Sistek: 

I love that. 

[00:35:16] Sage Goodwin: 

Because we're nosy and also because we always love a good recommendation, we wanna hear a little bit about your media diet. We think about it like what's your meat and two veg, where do you get your main sources of information, but also what's your junk food like, where do you, where, where do you go for fun?

[00:35:35] Marcus Mann: 

So I usually check in on the New York Times for my basic news. And I try to pay attention to the newswires, which again are pretty good at sticking to straight news reporting. So, like the Associated Press, Reuters, and NPRI, are found to be good sources of news as well. So that would be my general media diet.

Although lately I've been trying to stay just outside of work, not paying attention to anything. So I guess that's my meat and two veg right there, but any source that has a news reporting division, because there are so many that just don't have 'em anymore. I think you're in good shape if you can find that. And then my guilty pleasure. So this is very guilty. I have my origins as a Boston bro. I was a young Boston bro at one point, and I read Barstool Sports back in the day. Are you familiar with Barstool Sports? So I've gone from reading it as a young bro to just kind of being fascinated by it and how it's changed over time. And so it's become more political. It's become different over the past 20 years or so. So I check in on it kind of sociologically from time to time, but they also cover my New England Patriots regularly. And so I'll read the sports there. But I do find myself going back to Barto Sports every once in a while. That's a little guilty pleasure.

[00:37:01] Sage Goodwin: 

Amazing. Marcus, thank you so much for coming and having a chat with us. If people wanna find out more of your insights, find out more about your research, where should they go?

[00:37:13] Marcus Mann: 

They can go to marcusmann.net. I do a pretty bad job keeping it up to date. 

[00:37:20] Sage Goodwin: 

I will say I had a look at it this morning, and the Classy Religion article is not there. 

[00:37:25] Marcus Mann: 

Well, it's not there yet. I'm gonna do a better job, I promise, starting tomorrow. I'll do a better job keeping that up to date. Other than that, Google Scholar man. That's the best way to find my latest articles and what I'm working on. 

[00:37:38] Sage Goodwin:

Amazing. Thanks so much. Thank you again. This was great. 

[00:37:42] Marcus Mann: 

Thank you. That was great.

[00:37:43] Julius Freeman:

This has been another episode of Captivated. It's been hosted by a Kat you know, captivated you. You guys get it. It's the Center for American Political History, Media, and Technology. 

[00:37:57] Hanna Sistek:

The ideas presented by individuals on the podcast are theirs and theirs alone. They do not represent Purdue University, which adheres to the policy of institutional neutrality. 

[00:38:06] Sage Goodwin:

To learn more about this episode's guest, check out the show notes. We really enjoyed this conversation today, and we hope you got something out of it too. Thanks for listening. 



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Hanna Sistek

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Julius Freeman

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Sage Goodwin

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