The Polarizing Effect of New Media Messages

The conservative talk radio phenomenon in the United States provides a case study of how ‘narrowcasted’ new media—particularly those of a partisan nature—might shape audience opinions over time. This particular study returns to one of the questions raised in this journal by Matthew Mendelsohn and Richard Nadeau (1996): How might a more fragmented media environment accentuate existing cleavages and polarize opinion? The analysis demonstrates that listeners to a particular talk radio program audience not only hold conservative views, but that they leaned further to the right than they did in the early 1990s. Specifically, listening to the Rush Limbaugh program is associated with significant—and unique—shifts to the right between 1992 and 1996. Such findings suggest that as an increasingly fragmented media environment allows more individuals to seek out partisan sources of political information, opinion polarization may follow.