Protect Family Values or False Equivalency?
For all our talk about the importance of family values,
recent
data
demonstrating that middle class parents increasingly lack the resources needed
to raise their children should be of primary concern to our elected officials
and candidates…yet there is a stunning silence on these questions in this
campaign. Perhaps because our campaigns and elected officials are increasingly dominated by those who hate government?
Data from the Center
for American Progress demonstrates that middle-class families are
increasingly squeezed economically such that ‘parenthood’ has become unaffordable. While too many of our elites like to dismiss
the idea of it taking a village, they are advancing a political-culture that is
undermining even their more limited view of ‘family values.’
Middle class parents are “caught between stagnating wages
and the exploding cost of basics like housing, health care and children’s
education.” The cost of childcare has risen “nearly tenfold”
since the 1960s. “Most families today
don’t have enough saved to meet basic needs for three months, let alone save
for college or retirement….”
“Higher-income families spend six
times more than working-class families on child care and educational resources,
such as high-quality day care, summer camps, computers and private schools,
which are increasingly indispensable investments in long-term success. This
spending inequity has tripled over the last four decades and is only
accelerating, which is likely to widen the achievement gap, creating a vicious
cycle.”
At the same time, our leaders continue to abandon public schools,
the social safety net, successful programs like Head Start, childhood health
care programs, and living wage jobs…widening the inequality and class divide in
America to redistribute opportunity upward.
David
Lauter, from the
LA Times,
reports on recent data from the
Pew
Research Center.
Perhaps this can
help us figure out why the most pressing conflicts described above are taking a
back seat in this election to empty posturing and distracting hyperbole.
Lauter begins with this conclusion:
“Die-hard liberals and
down-the-line conservatives have segregated themselves into strikingly
different news universes, relying on sources of information that often
reinforce their views and discussing politics mostly with others of like minds,
according to an in-depth new study.”
On the one hand, it is not news to learn that many of us
listen to and talk with friends and family in our daily lives who largely share
views remarkably similar to our own.
The
Pew Research Center project demonstrates what Fiorina had shown
earlier, that this polarizing tendency is more prominent among the very few of
us who qualify as the most politically active Americans.
The bulk of Americans remain much more moderate, but it is
important to see that our most active and elite fellow citizens are
increasingly polarized—meaning they see the other side not as fellow citizens
with competing ideas, but as existential threats to America. This matches our observation that Congress is
paralyzed into inaction by polarization.
It is also not surprising to find that these ultra-partisans
rely on different sources for their daily news.
Or that, for these ultra-partisans, the sources relied upon by their
mortal enemies are deemed untrustworthy.
What is somewhat disturbing is that Lauter chose to frame this as ‘both
sides are doing it,’ when the data tells a very different story. Lauter notes
that,
“Nearly half of consistent
conservatives (47%) named Fox News as their main source of information about
government and politics…. [But] No single source dominates the audience on the
left the way Fox dominates the right. CNN, MSNBC, NPR and the New York Times
each were cited by 10% or more of consistent liberals as their chief sources of
political and government news.”
As we would expect from the
Mann
and Ornstein analysis, this ‘both sides are doing it’ frame is both
fundamentally misleading and a significant part of the problem Lauter is
attempting to draw our attention to here.
Lauter goes on,
“Because of its ubiquity among
conservatives, getting coverage on Fox has become crucial for Republican
political candidates. Among 36 news
sources in the survey, including print, online and broadcast outlets, liberals
rated 28 as more trusted than not, and conservatives trusted just eight,
including Rush Limbaugh, the radio talk show host, and the online Drudge
Report.”
So, the data suggests that conservatives have far fewer
sources of news and that these prominently include sources that scholarly
analysis repeatedly demonstrates are misinforming their viewers (Fox News,
Limbaugh, and Drudge). Liberals, on the
other hand, have a much larger range of sources and nearly all of these fall
into that ‘liberal’ category some call mainstream professional news
organizations.
