That looks to be the view of many people according to the findings of the latest PoliticsHome Impact Tracker.
The tracker asks: “Below is a list of news stories that the media have focused on this week. Looking back over the week, please say which stories, if any, have most interested you. You may choose up to three.”
The overall figures show some interesting trends – the top story getting interest was ID cards (with 31%) just beating the story about two police dogs dying in a hot patrol car (29%). Yes, that’s right – a hard political story beat an animal tragedy story for interest from the public. In addition to those two, the renationalisation of the East Coast rail line also got more interest than the ongoing story of Michael Jackson’s death, a finding that raises some interesting questions about some of the media’s editorial judgements.
But what really caught my eye was the variation in the results when looked at by party affiliation. It’s perhaps no surprise that Conservative and Lib Dem supporters were far more likely to find the ID cards story interesting than Labour supporters. After all, they are both more likely to be opposed to ID cards, and generally opponents think ID cards are a much bigger deal than supporters.
It goes on though. Labour and Lib Dem supporters were much more interested in the railway renationalisation than Conservatives; Conservative and Lib Dems were more interested than Labour in the criticism of Michael Martin being given a peerage; Labour and Lib Dems were more interested than Conservatives in the news that George Osborne’s mortgage expense claims are being investigated and so on.
It looks as if people’s interest in a story is driven to a significant extent by the degree to which they agree with it. Don’t like renationalisation? Not interested in news of it happening then.
People are, and should be, free to make those sorts of choices about what interests them. If they are only interested in hearing about things that suit the views they already have, that’s their right. But that narrowness of outlook is not good for society and democracy.
It is also an outlook that the internet makes it much easier to follow. Online it’s very easy to pick and choose the news that interests you and ignore the rest. It’s a point Cass Sunstein made in his book Republic.com, first published in 2001. (The second edition of his book is available from Amazon).
In his conclusion, Cass Sunstein quoted John Stuart Mill:
It is hardly possible to overstate the value, in the present state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with other persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are unfamiliar … Such communication has always been … one of the primary sources of progress.
And so, I’m off to read the Daily Mail, again.
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3 Comments
‘did you find this story interesting?’ is not the same question as ‘did you read this story?’ though, is it? That research doesn’t prove that people don’t read things they are not interested in; it might prove that thier political views affect what they are willing to tell researchers is interesting, though. However, correlation is not causation, as you well know, dr Pack.
Agree, there’s always a risk that people are knowingly trying to game the opinion poll (e.g. I don’t think party X will win the next election, but I’ll say that I do because that will generate a better poll result for party X) and that could be a factor. But it’s a striking pattern, even if the explanation is not a straight forward one.
Yep. I think it’s one of the problems with the Internet actually – it’s too easy to filter out people or opinions you don’t like. I’d quite like a Bayesian filter for news which learns what I’m interested in, but occasionally throws me a curve ball out of the reject pile, just to keep me on my toes.
Part of the reason I like the Independent as a newspaper is that it has the right balance for me between opinion pieces I agree with, and ones I dislike. This encourages me to challenge the article, and hence examine my own assumptions and beliefs.
And there’s always Lib Dem Voice to provide me with plenty of people and opinions I disagree with!