Source: Kamila Ferreira/Pexels When a person is polarized, their polarized speech and actions spring from the beliefs they hold. And those beliefs and attitudes, in turn, are fed by the pool of information sources they draw on. What are those information sources?
A big one is television.
In 1949, the FCC instituted the Fairness Doctrine for the holders of all broadcasting licenses. This doctrine required that all broadcast media present both sides of any political question whenever they weren’t reporting straight news. This doctrine was the law of the land until 1989 when Ronald Reagan vetoed it.
The broadcast environment that came into being after the Fairness Doctrine was abolished set the stage for our current political polarization.
During the time of the Fairness Doctrine, there were only three major news networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC. But once the Fairness Doctrine was abolished, broadcasters saw that there were great economic advantages to be gained from setting up new networks designed to exploit clearly defined political demographics.
Enter Fox News.
When there were only three different networks, all required to adhere to the Fairness Doctrine, everybody shared essentially the same information. The spokespeople delivering the news were different from network to network (remember Walter Cronkite?), but the news they delivered was the same. NBC, CBS, and ABC were competing networks, all carrying the same news.
In essence, there was only one news universe.
With the entrance of Fox News, everything changed. Freed from the constraints of the Fairness Doctrine, broadcasters were now able to give their own opinions of the news without needing to share the views of the other side or even, in fact, the actual news.
When a television viewer has two alternatives to choose from, one that makes them angry and one that doesn’t, they almost always make the same choice: anger.
There are mountains of data from multiple sources that show people, when given a choice, will overwhelmingly choose the alternative that makes them angry. (Or angrier.)
Blame it on saber tooth tigers. Early in our species’ history, we shared our immediate environment with saber-toothed tigers and other formidable predators. Whenever a saber-toothed tiger loomed into view, those early humans who were alarmed and adrenalized either fought or fled. And lived to pass on their DNA to us.
So, thanks to saber-toothed tigers, we have inherited a tendency to get excitable over anything that frightens us or stirs up our adrenaline.
Fox News uses this information as the basis of its business plan. They want you to get riled up. The angrier you get, the more money they make. That’s why they have the highest ratings of all the television channels.
And, not to be outdone, MSNBC has been set up to cater to the fears and anger of the other side. Fox News and MSNBC are enemy combatants lined up on opposite sides of the political divide.
So the news universe, which once presented a highly uniform, factual view of the world during the era of the Fairness Doctrine, is now splintered into a number of very different, competing, incompatible visions of our world.
And in addition to television complicating our world, we now also have the internet and social media.
Organizations like Twitter and Facebook argue that they are platforms, not publishers. Hence they claim no responsibility for the truth or accuracy of any of the items in their domains. And in such an environment, misinformation and disinformation flourish. There are lots of opportunities to create “news” stories that are guaranteed to make people angry. It is a breeding ground for conspiracy theories.
Environment Essential Reads
Climate Heats Up Youth Across the Political Spectrum 
Is Viewing Water Outdoors More Restorative Than Green Spaces? So, we have a new information reality in our country since the demise of the Fairness Doctrine. People no longer share a similar information source but now inhabit separate information universes that offer competing, mutually hostile world views. And the advent of the internet has spread a miasmic fog of anger-producing misinformation.
With all these changes that have taken place on television, and with the advent of the internet, it is easy to see why our country is so polarized.
To de-polarize our country, our first step is to become aware of the forces causing that polarization. And what we need to do now is develop a de-polarization strategy to adapt to this new information reality.
That’s our current challenge.