Conservatives Still Don't Read, but Now Listen to Rogan

New data shows that the right-wing bubble has gotten worse

“Liberals Read, Conservatives Watch TV” from 2021 is still my fifth most read article. It developed a holistic theory of differences in behavior within American conservatism and liberalism based on the fact that one of these sides has a reading culture while the other exists in a world that is overwhelmingly audiovisual. Here is the key graph from that essay.

This data was from 2019. I’ve always assumed that things must have gotten bleaker since then. We now have confirmation that this is indeed the case.

Pew Research has just released a survey asking about many of the same news sources, along with some new ones. The key findings are below.

Over the course of six years, in many ways the big picture results haven’t changed.

Fox News still dominates the right like no source does on the left. The gap between Fox and the second-place source of news for Republicans, which is ABC, is 30 percentage points. Meanwhile, Democrats’ top source, CNN, has two other outlets within two points of it. Moreover, the general result that newspapers are much more likely to be read by Democrats still holds.

The biggest change since 2019 is the rise of Joe Rogan. At 22%, he is tied with CBS as the fourth largest news source on the right. Note there are ten sources of news that Democrats pay attention to at higher levels than that. Republicans just follow current events less overall.

We also see the rise of Newsmax (15%) and the Tucker Carlson Network (9%). The latest survey did not provide Limbaugh and Hannity as options. The former is of course dead, and for whatever reason they didn’t ask about the latter.

Previously, one could say that liberals were more likely to consume serious sources of information, while conservatives were into partisan slop. But the major shift since 2019 is the rise of fake news. Hannity and Limbaugh were always low-quality sources of information, but in their heyday they did not tell you that vaccines were dangerous, demons were visiting us in the form of UFOs, astrology might be real, or that the Ancient Egyptians built the pyramids with alien technology. I’ve seen clips of Hannity’s TV show, and while he has now incorporated some MAHA and conspiratorial narratives, having moved with the times, he is still most comfortable as a purveyor of partisan talking points.

The person who gets their news from Rogan or Tucker is misinformed about the world in a much deeper way than the boomer who once listened to Limbaugh on his way back home from work. Maybe this previous generation of Republican voter would’ve believed in one or two conspiracy theories about political opponents, like that Obama was born in Kenya. He wasn’t completely checked out of reality like Tucker is on everything from health and nutrition to geopolitics.

Newsmax, meanwhile, is like Fox in that it is a pro-Trump propaganda network, but its content is much more cultish and divorced from the traditional norms of journalism. A major difference is that when Fox talks about Trump’s great body, it’s done with a wink and a nod, while if you watch Newsmax there is no hint of irony as they salivate over their Adonis. To take one example of just how bad the content there is, here is one host in 2021 talking about how vaccines “go against nature” by letting the weak survive. In late 2020, Fox actually began hemorrhaging viewers to Newsmax because it would not wholeheartedly accept Trump’s stolen election narrative. This I think is a nice demonstration that conservative media has a demand problem. The right-wing audience is not calling out for more unbiased or higher quality journalism. When they get mad at Fox, it’s because the network doesn’t worship Trump enough.

Below is Pew data on how much conservatives and liberals trust the different news sources, excluding those who haven’t heard of them.

When I posted this chart on Twitter, a MAGA brought up the Hunter laptop. A much smarter follower responded that it was funny that Republicans didn’t trust the New York Post, which broke the story. Most likely, as I pointed out in the 2021 article, many of these people probably don’t know much about the New York Post, but have a heuristic that “if something is a newspaper, don’t trust it.”

The Pew poll doesn’t even measure social media consumption. I wish we had data on who tends to follow and trust fake news influencer accounts like those of Catturd and Elon Musk. I’ve previously pointed out that for practically every dramatic news event, conservative social media immediately begins to spin into a misinformation vortex, with fabricated narratives being pushed by some of the most prominent figures on the right. This even happened over the weekend, when a person who is obviously a right-winger shot two Democratic state legislators and Musk and Mike Lee were still implying that the perpetrator was a leftist.

I’ve been stressing the terrible epistemological practices and overall stupidity of American conservatism for four years now. Over that time, the situation has continued to deteriorate. Just like how I’m now pining for the days when conservatives were listening to Rush Limbaugh, it’s possible that in another six years we will look back fondly on the Rogan-Tucker era as one in which conservatives were relatively sane.

There’s an optimistic case to be made that all of this is largely a Trump effect, where our politics just happens to be dominated now by a man with an unusually deformed moral sense and a unique connection with the misinformed masses. When he goes away, things might return to a more normal state. At the same time, we can’t rule out the possibility that, as education polarization continues to solidify new norms within each political coalition, AI rises, and the ability to differentiate fact from fiction becomes more important, the worst is yet to come.