Is the Media Out of Touch With Voters?

Glenn Beck or Keith Olbermann too polarizing for your taste? Good luck finding someone on TV or the radio mouthing off from the middle. In a Washington Post op-ed, MSNBC contributor and radio host Michael Smerconish probes the highly partisan media political dial, where, he says, "Opinions from the middle are underrepresented, even shunned." Smerconish sheds some light on the behind-the-scenes puppeteering, drawing from his own experiences as a talking head and citing producers on major networks of various persuasions shaping the narrative along sharply partisan lines: "There is no room for nuance. Either you offer a consistent (possibly artificial) ideological view or you often don't get a say." This dynamic, according to Smerconish, is out of sync with the public opinion: Smerconish cites a recent Wall Street Journal poll in which more respondents classified themselves as moderate than as any other political affiliation. According to Smerconish, it's not just pundits who are stoking the fires on-air: politicians play up extreme positions to appeal to the "most reliable voters, those who vote in primaries, tend to be the most polarized and make the most contributions."