Media Fragmentation Analysis

Income Inequality, Media Fragmentation, And Increased Political Polarization by John Duca looks at the several factors that has increased polarization in the United States. First Duca examined the concept of income inequality. Income inequality is the concept that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and polarization is created from policies that cause that concept to only increase. Duca puts his hypothesis to test by comparing house polarization (Congress) to income inequality trends. “Using time series techniques, we find that this uptrend largely has a stronger statistical link to greater media fragmentation than to income inequality.” The second and more strongly correlated to polarization is the factor of media fragmentation. Media fragmentation is the increasing choices and platforms, media is consumed from. Duca tests his hypothesis by comparing the amount of cable televisions in homes to the house polarization. The data show that cable strongly correlates to the increase of polarization. Duca concludes “In particular, greater access to cable or pay TV in the United States appears to predate increases in the polarization indexes.” Duca does explain that it is hard to address these issues since there may …show more content…
“Today, 92% of Republicans are to the right of the median Democrat, and 94% of Democrats are to the left of the median Republican.” The data from the survey shows a large divide in ideologies from the idea of the nation’s wellbeing to the decline of political constancy. The article also discusses the topic of the disappearing middle class due to the widening gap between the rich and poor, this is something I want to cover because it’s very important to the idea of political polarization. The data shows many different aspects of polarization and how it effects the public including the idea of echo-