This is a lightly edited transcript of the September 11 episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: Welcome to another episode of Right Now, The New Republic’s twice weekly video podcast about politics and policy. I’m Perry Bacon, the host. I have a great guest. Shannon McGregor is a professor at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Media. So Shannon, welcome.
Shannon McGregor: Hi. Thanks for having me.
Bacon: We’re going to talk about two ideas. You write a lot about politics and media and communication and the intersection of those concepts. We’re going to talk about two kind of ideas that I think are at the core of—we have a lot of episodes here about media and higher education and politics, and I think there are two ideas that are at the core of those fields. They’re polarization and neutrality. They’re two concepts that have become these defining concepts.
And polarization, I’m going to admit to having fallen into that myself a lot. But I want to talk about—I don’t think people were using the word polarization that often in 1995 or what have you, but it’s become this sort of, over the last decade, if you read an article about politics, or particularly a book, you’ll almost always see “Americans are polarized,” “Politics is polarized.”
It’s a word you don’t see in many other contexts beyond politics. And I want you to talk about the roots of that first. Where did this sort of polarization discourse come from, as far as you can tell?
McGregor: Yeah. At least some of the earliest roots of it trace back to—I can’t remember what year it was, but sometime earlier in the 1900s, actually, the American political scientists said the problem is the parties aren’t polarized enough, and Americans don’t know how to make decisions because they can’t tell the differences between the parties. That’s like the—not that the word didn’t exist before.
But I think where it has come up, within more recent memory, is this idea of, how do we explain how divided people are? Why are politics so fraught? Why does it seem like people hate each other? It’s clear that is true. And so polarization has captured the mind, I think, of both, like you said, scholars, but also journalists, philanthropists—the Carnegie Organization, who said for the three years, like, all Carnegie grants will go to projects focused on solving for polarization.
But to my mind, one of the reasons that it’s become so popular as a way to diagnose what’s going on in our world is because it’s a way to talk about politics, but without really talking about politics. It’s a very power neutral way of diagnosing something, and it has a sort of ingrained both sides. I’m just going to go like this, but you can’t see. Two sides of the poles. And so it’s everyone’s problem and everyone’s responsible for it.
Bacon: And so what is the problem with the polarization frame? Because you’ve written about this eloquently. A few years ago, I’ve read a few—you were the first person I saw that really, within academia—there were certainly people on the left who were writers, but I think you were the first person who has a PhD, who really said maybe we should—you and Daniel, is it Crease or Kreiss?
McGregor: Kreiss. Yeah.
Bacon: Daniel Kreiss, another—I guess he has moved, but another colleague of yours—wrote a piece arguing this polarization frame was wrong. Talk about what the problem is with that frame.
McGregor: So there’s a couple problems with it. First of all is what I mentioned, it has no analysis of power. And what it means is, like, why are we polarized? What are we polarized over? Why is this actually this huge problem? And that sort of obscures what’s actually happening, which is that we have this sort of extremism coming, at this point in our country, although in many countries around the world, from the right, that has a very anti-democratic streak to it.
And if we are solving for things like polarization, and there’s two poles, that sort of makes it seem like the answer then is if both sides move together. But should we move together to reach consensus on whether people should have human and civil rights if they are trans or not white? That doesn’t seem like the small-D democratic answer, right? And so it allows journalists, academics to have this sort of conversation that isn’t really a conversation about politics and power.
And I think one of the other points that we make that I think is really important is that there’s this whole idea that polarization is bad. Certainly there are parts of it that can be bad, and people have looked at that. But also what that does is obscures the fact that polarization has always happened when we have had movements in this country towards greater equality, right? So there’s all this sort of hand-wringing against the polarization of Americans after the Black Lives Matter movement at its peak in 2020.
First of all, if you dig into the public opinion data, it’s actually that liberal white Americans moved more in favor of supporting the right of Black Americans to not be murdered by police. So that polarization obscures that. But the argument is polarization might in fact be necessary for democracy. People in power will always hold on to that power, but if that means we’re polarized against movements towards democracy, towards equality, then that doesn’t really seem like the right diagnosis for the problem.
Bacon: Let me dig in a little bit. So it is fair to say that, like, Bull Connor and Martin Luther King were probably polarized against each other, to use a very reductive example. In a very silly way. And I think Bull Connor and Martin Luther King probably may have voted for the Democratic candidate in whatever year. But I think we’re now saying there’s more division by party than there used to be.
Like, in the 1960s, there were conservative Democrats and conservative Republicans, and liberal Republicans, and right now, the two parties are more—I think the more accurate term might be, the parties are more sorted now. If you are, like, pro-choice, you’re likely to be a Democrat, and if you’re anti-choice, to be Republican. We can go through a bunch of these. So the parties are sorted.
So people who maybe—I live in Kentucky, so people who maybe used to vote for a conservative Democrat, or an anti-choice Democrat, now vote for a Republican. I think the sorting is correct.
McGregor: 100 percent.
Bacon: So we have fewer people who are swinging from one party to another. There’s still some swing voters. There’s a little fewer of these voters. I think the sorting is a true thing. The difference between saying something is sorted and saying something is polarized is a little bit different. Can you talk about why?
McGregor: Yeah. One of the things that’s different about it is polarized means that there’s some equidistant relationship, is what it sounds like, right? I’m not a mathematician, but I think neither are most people, right? So when we use that word, it sounds like then these two poles are equidistant from some mythical and idealized center, which is where we should all be moving, both maybe at the political level, but even at the sort of individual level, right?
And even to relate this to the sorting—in some ways that’s what these political scientists in the 1900s were arguing, which was, like, People can’t sort themselves correctly into parties because the parties aren’t different enough. Now we’ve gone—I wouldn’t say the parties are different enough, but in some ways we’ve gone to the other end of these things, right? But the problem is, as far as it relates to polarization, the parties have not sorted along similar lines, right?
The work of good friend and colleague Lilliana Mason has talked about this, right? The ideological sorting into the Republican Party is a very homogenous group of folks, and everyone else is in the Democratic Party. And so those beliefs are not as coherent, and it’s not as strong of a coherence along those lines. Where on the right, there’s very clear coherence, not only sort of homogeneity and identity, but also in what you think, and maybe who you don’t like.
And so to diagnose that as polarization isn’t really what we’re getting at. And then I think the next step that both academics but also a lot of journalists take then is, if we’re polarized, these two equidistant poles, and we have to try and get to the middle, how do we get there? When we think about it among the public, people say, People can’t talk to each other anymore. If they can just talk to each other, then that will solve so many things.
First of all, not only is the empirical evidence on that not great, that has any impact, but also the idea that a person from a group that has been not only perhaps historically marginalized, but that someone on the other side hates, says shouldn’t have civil or human rights, should engage in a conversation with a person who feels that way about them to reach some middle ground on that—which at the best is going to be uncomfortable and at the worst could be harmful for that person—is an idea that I find frankly ridiculous.
Bacon: So if there’s differences, like I think you said to me a few minutes ago that I want to come back to, which is, polarization also—even if we use that term, let’s forget that term—polarization obscures, what are we arguing about, right? And so if we talk about what are the parties sorted on, what are the differences between parties, it would seem to me that what they’re sorted on is, one party is for multiracial, multicultural democracy, the other kind of isn’t. One party’s for election results should count.
I think it’s important to say what are we talking about here. We’re talking about the parties are different is what we’re really saying, right?
McGregor: Yes. Yeah, and I think that is one of the many things that this sort of meta idea of polarization obscures. We say people are polarized about what? That people should have guns everywhere and in schools to protect against people with guns in schools, or not, right? Do we live in a multiracial pluralistic society, or should it be a white Christian nation?
And those different ideas are not only far from one another, but one is democratic, small D, I don’t mean partisan, and the other one is not. And that is what’s then really hard to get to when we’re thinking about it through the lens of polarization.
Bacon: So I’m reading this paper by someone named Peter Törnberg. He teaches at the University of Amsterdam. I don’t know him, but the title is, and it may remind you of—”It’s Not Polarization, It’s the Radicalization of the Political Right.” And he argues that the polarization frame has been modified by scholars and journalists who use the phrase asymmetric, affective.
There’s all this new literature that sort of tries to—asymmetric polarization is a coded way to say the Republicans are more radical. But in some ways, he argues maybe if the frame doesn’t work, we should stop applying the frame and stop adding adjectives to it. Do you agree with that?
McGregor: Yes, 100 percent. And this is part of what we argued, like you said, in this other piece I wrote with my colleague Daniel Kreiss three years ago, which is, it is extremity. It is, even historically in this country, white racial repression that has been far more dangerous for democracy than polarization has ever been. And adding these little adjectives to it doesn’t make it any better of a way to look at things.
Bacon: So part of what’s going on here, and you hinted at some of the answers, is that if you’re a journalist and you don’t want to offend some of your readership—you work at CBS, no, a bad example. You work at ABC or NBC, a network at least in theory trying not to do one party’s political task for it. You don’t want to offend your readers, so calling the Republican Party radicals, that’s going to offend them.
You teach at a University of North Carolina public university, purple state, so I assume maybe some of your colleagues might be leery of calling one party radical. So part of what I assume is happening is, polarization is a way to not offend.
And so people are placing being inoffensive over being accurate, right? Is that part of what the story is, you think? Or do you think people actually genuinely believe polarization, and the parties are equally divided or equally radical? Let me not get into motives here.
McGregor: Yeah. I think the idea—and this is part of what I think has happened in academia, but specifically in the media as well—there’s this conflation with the idea of objectivity and neutrality. So I teach in a journalism school, right?
Like you said, we do teach this idea that means that you should go into something, reporting the story without any preconceived notions perhaps of what is going on. That’s objectivity. There’s issues with that.
Bacon: That’s going to be a topic for a whole nother day. Everyone walks into a story knowing murder is bad and not good, so the idea that you walk into a story neutrally about whether someone kill—there’s no sort of—everyone has preconceived notions. I think we should dispense with this kind of crazy objectivity idea.
McGregor: Yes. View from nowhere. But nonetheless, objectivity is still a thing that is core to the idea of journalism, and journalism especially, I think, in very mainstream journalism. The same people who might critique it—it’s so built into the norms and routines of the way we cover things, especially politics.
So objectivity gets conflated then with neutrality, and so then thinking about things through the lens of polarization is easy, because it seems very politically neutral, and it lets you describe a conflict without taking a position on which one might be wrong or right, to use the murder example perhaps, right? Much less to what we were talking about earlier, about what the conflicts are actually over.
Bacon: And I think that, in some ways, you could be describing the conflicts, points you toward one side. Because as you said, if the conflict is over multiracial democracy versus X, then X seems bad. So even describing the conflict is part of the problem here.
McGregor: Yeah, because providing that context, then you are at risk—I think journalists think you’re at risk then of being called partisan, or biased, right? But being neutral does not make, I think, anyone seem objective when the asymmetries are so clear also, for example, I think even to the vast majority of the public, right?
And this results in things like, I think, a lot of, at the best, maybe double standards in coverage when we think about it along political lines. But I think also then it results in this idea that people can’t understand the democratic consequences of what is happening with the extremism and the authoritarianism that is growing in this country.
Bacon: I was going to ask about neutrality. So I think most people, if you ask what should journalists be, they would say some combination of balanced, objective, and neutral. Those are not all the same word, but talk about what the problem is with this sort of mix of things, or the phrases we use here.
McGregor: Yes. Wow. There’s lots of problems, right? The idea of objectivity, balance has been critiqued, I think rightfully, as this view from nowhere, like you mentioned earlier, as if people don’t exist in the world and have ideas. And I think especially with the idea of being balanced—this is obviously very exacerbated by the fact that we have a two-party system—but what that ends up in reporting style is, like, the Republicans said this, which is that, for example, Black people shouldn’t have the right to vote as equally in the South. And Democrats said, We think they should, right?
That every vote should count. And then there’s sort of no context around, what are the implications of that for the fact that we are supposedly trying to live in a democracy, where it does matter that every person’s vote should count, and that’s not actually a partisan statement.
And one of the things that I’ve been thinking about more in some recent work is, like, how even when the press covers issues with democracy, and talking about authoritarianism and backsliding, they attribute what might be the critiques of authoritarianism, backsliding, to partisan actors. So rather than it being a thing that is actually a problem—and we can even have an expert to say it, if you don’t want to have to say it in your voice—it gets attributed to partisan actors. So this idea that wanting to strive for a democracy is partisan comes up, I think, in this way of looking at balanced coverage.
Bacon: I love that. Because in some ways, once democracy became an issue in politics, it weakened support for democracy, because the media can’t cover democracy as a—once the Republicans became against democracy, the media functionally has to be somewhat neutral on democracy, right?
McGregor: And there’s this sort of schizophrenic coverage that happens. Because many large news organizations do have journalists who I would describe as being on, like, the democracy beat, right? And these journalists are explicitly not doing what we’re talking about, right? They are covering democratic backsliding, threats to civil rights, threats to democracy, outside of this sort of balanced frame.
But then other folks at that very same news organization who are covering politics—which I’ll just point out the fact that that’s divorced from coverage of democracy is, in and of itself, a problem—are then covering it through this sort of both sides. Democracy itself has become a partisan thing.
And when I’ve spoken to journalists about this before, some folks have said, “We can’t have, like, an idea. We’re just reporting what’s happening.” OK, but the press exists the way that it does in this country and in other democracies because of democracy. So are you trying to write yourself not only out of a job, but our country out of a democracy? This seems like a very non-problematic stance to take, which is that we live in a democracy and should be trying to.
Bacon: I think the implicit assumption is that Donald Trump will not outlaw them. But if he has a second term—I guess he already has a second term—but if we keep going on in this direction, we’re going to have fewer journalists. I don’t think people in my field really understand, the right wing in its current form is a threat to my field, and I would argue your field is experiencing it more directly.
McGregor: Very much.
Bacon: And so that’s an interesting way to put it. So what is an alternative? OK, so you linked together—I was going to ask about neutrality and objectivity separately from polarization. But you think these ideas are tied together in some way?
McGregor: Yeah. Yes, I do. And I think the link is that then talking about something as polarization allows you to appear—
Bacon: To be neutral.
McGregor: —balanced and neutral, because it’s both sides’ problems. And the answer is in the middle.
Bacon: OK, so if we agree that the radicalization of the right is the problem, then I guess that makes a lot of the work we do much different, right? I hadn’t really thought about the fact that if universities are giving, or philanthropies are giving money to projects that are based on polarization, it’s just a much safer way to describe the problem, right? This is part of where we’re getting at, is, this is a safe way to describe the problem.
McGregor: Yeah, it’s a safe way to describe the problem. And in the paper that I wrote several years ago with my colleague Daniel Kreiss, we talk about, like, the historical and empirical and normative shortcomings of polarization.
The problems with it. I think, as we’re talking about as it relates to both philanthropy and journalism and academia, those historical, empirical, and normative shortcomings of polarization are a feature, they’re not a bug, that make it attractive to these groups, because it obscures rather than illuminates these democratic troubles that we have.
Bacon: So if you had a philanthropy that was focusing on the radicalization of the right, why would that be bad? Why would they not want—if that was, if the real problem—
McGregor: First of all, they’d be getting attacked right now, and having their 501(c)(3) status, like, potentially revoked.
Bacon: I see. And if you’re a news outlet, you have some readers who are going to move on to other things. OK, I see.
McGregor: Yeah. And I also think part of this is about, especially if you’re a journalist who’s covering politics right now, right? And you ideally have sources that you talk to in office, or their staffers, in the Republican Party and Democratic Party. If you call it the extremism and the authoritarianism of the Republican Party, you’re going to lose those sources.
Now, I would argue I don’t think that is necessarily a problem, and folks refusing to talk to you because of that would in fact itself be worth reporting. But that’s pretty far outside the norms of what standard sort of DC political reporting looks like.
Bacon: Yeah, it’s not a great situation when one of the most famous journalists is known for her access to Donald Trump staffers. I can tell you not a lot of Black people have a lot of access to Donald Trump staffers. We can talk about why that might be the case, and so we might want to dig into that a little bit.
Let me finish on another subject, because it’s about communication. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Whenever I hear people talk about the media and politics, they have two thoughts. The first is, No one’s reading anything anymore. Traffic is down to websites. People don’t read. Young people don’t read anything. All they do is look at social media and TikTok. Fine. That might be true. The second is, Can you believe The New York Times, on paragraph 19, did not say Trump is a fascist, or say he’s anti-democratic?
So it feels contradictory to me, in the sense that—I’m not trying to defend the journalists, but if no one’s consuming the media as such broadly, then whether it’s too neutral or not doesn’t really matter. Are we at the point where that mainstream media coverage and that critique is outdated, because the media people are consuming is some combination of Instagram, TikTok, Substack, X?
Explain to me, is there an inherent tension in these critiques, or are they still both kind of valid critiques? People don’t consume the media, and the media is too both sides.
McGregor: I think yes and. So I actually think they’re related in some ways, because I think for a long time, the mainstream media has not covered what’s going on in the world in a way that seems true to people.
And it doesn’t seem true to people that they would be neutral. Like, in this economy, right? So they seek out other sources where there’s not the same idea, and people are talking about what does feel actually relevant to them. So I’d actually say I think they’re a bit related.
Bacon: And the media may be participating in its own demise by being so—
McGregor: To some extent. Now, do I think this explains all of it? No. But some of it, sure.
Bacon: That’s helpful. I myself, a person who’s been in the media their entire life, do seek out other things. Like, I read a paper based in Britain each day called The Guardian, because if I want to know what Trump did and hear about it without the sort of false equivalency, I can’t read The New York Times, because they believe in that. So The Guardian’s an alternative to the US press that I use, because I feel like I need it.
McGregor: And are more upfront about where they’re coming from, in the same way that content creators on TikTok or Instagram are as well, right? It doesn’t mean I think that either of those things aren’t problematic. But especially to your sort of second idea of, does it matter then what the mainstream media is doing?
Bacon: My point being that I hear people saying, Can you believe Bari Weiss did X for 60 Minutes? And sometimes I agree with that, but I’m also like, “Since you’re not over 70, when was the last time you watched 60 Minutes?” Or really the CBS News, the morning. So Bari Weiss is doing things I don’t agree with at CBS, but I am trying to probe, does that matter? And I think yes, the answer is yes, but I want to hear why from someone who gets more—
McGregor: So I think it matters, A, partially because of what I just said. I think it’s still driving other people’s media habits, so whatever the mainstream media is doing has that impact. I also think it matters because we have a lot of research actually in my field that shows that mainstream media—New York Times, CBS, Washington Post, et cetera—set the agenda for what coverage looks like. Very broadly, right? When we then look at local media, when we look at how other people are going to interpret it—
Bacon: So I know that’s true for, like, local media. I know that’s been a long time, The New York Times sets the agenda for, like, local TV news. Is that true for, like, social media too, or do we know that yet?
McGregor: I don’t know. I would have to look and see exactly how this plays out. But to some extent, yes, even if it is just reacting, right? Like, all these things of, “Oh, The New York Times doesn’t cover this or that.” People are arguing about this because that’s how The New York Times covered it. So it’s still setting the terms of the debate of how we’re talking about all these things.
And then also, CBS, New York Times, Meet the Press, et cetera, all of these outlets are still really important for political elites and politicians. And again, then that sort of feeds into this reciprocal way of covering things, and in this case, maybe not pointing out some of the real issues.
We also, to the social media side of things—from mainstream media, get quoted, clipped, recirculated. Like, I have never sat down and watched an episode of Stephen Colbert when he had the late night show. But man, my internet shows me, you know what I mean, clips of it. And same thing with things that might be on some of the morning shows.
And I think the last point is, it also matters because many of these changes and these issues that we’re talking about with the media, they’re not just happening, right? They are a response to not only very recent, very clear actual attacks, right, on individual journalists, on media outlets, but are part of a decades long project by those on the political right to undermine and attack the media.
And I think that is why things like the polarization lens becomes so attractive—even if, I don’t mean that this is, like, a conscious thing, right, that journalists are doing. No. But it becomes attractive because then you’re not alienating those folks.
I’ve thought about how I think the mainstream media sometimes is in what I might call similar to the dynamics of a domestic violence situation, with an abuser and their victim. Which is, the goalpost keeps getting moved of what you need to do. And that’s problematic in and of itself if you are supposedly being neutral and balanced as a press.
Bacon: Just meaning, being neutral before meant covering George Bush, who you might not agree with, as being a normal president. Now it means covering Donald Trump, who doesn’t honor election results, as a normal president. The goalposts keep moving to the right, basically.
McGregor: Yes, it keeps moving. And also there is no way to satisfy it, right? They’re never going to be satisfied.
Bacon: The Republican Party will never wake up and say The New York Times actually is fair and balanced. They’re never going to say that.
McGregor: Yeah. Because part of the identity of being conservative and of being Republican is to be anti-media. Anti-mainstream media. So whatever the mainstream media does is never going to be the thing that is going to be appealing.
Bacon: I was on a panel at APSA, which is the political science conference you were at, and you were on the panel, and it made me think—part of it is, I feel like our industries are the same, media and academia, in one sense, in that, is it worth recognizing that certain kinds of right-wing politics are going to be against the media and academia, because those are sources of independent authority and power, and both industries push a pluralistic democratic form of government?
Is it worth acknowledging that the media and academia are, to some extent—not intentionally hostile to the right wing, but the right wing as it is currently strong in America and Germany, those are against media and academia, right? There’s no way around that, right?
McGregor: Yeah. And I do think it’s worth recognizing, and it is very hard to recognize that. I don’t mean it’s hard for me to say it at a panel at APSA, or even to write about it. But for, certainly, I would say news leaders, or deans, or university presidents, this is almost impossible to say. And I don’t want to say it’s impossible to say, because I think that’s true—I’m saying I think that’s how it feels to them.
Because in fact, I would put it similar to how you were just saying it: these attacks on media and these attacks on universities are themselves ideological and partisan attacks. So responding to them by defending what have been the perhaps troubled but long-held small-D democratic beliefs of these two institutions is not a partisan response.
Bacon: They’re the partisans, not us, is what I wish people could say.
McGregor: Yes. And that is really a message that I wish I could hear more from people like university presidents, rather than this academic neutrality, or let’s fund a new civility center—which we could have a whole other half an hour talking about that side of things, and the problems with the civility push on campus.
Bacon: Institutional neutrality is the new thing at universities, which it sounds like is a very journalism-esque phrase for how we’re going to not offend Republicans. Last thing, this is a little bit off, but what did you think of the Woke 1.0 discourse? I’d be curious if you have any thoughts about that.
McGregor: I think this is actually in some ways very much a response to, or informed by, I would say, this idea of polarization, right? As if the reaction was to these movements that very rightly pointed out widespread racial violence committed by police and the state and the government. Issues of widespread physical and sexual violence against women in this country by men in positions of power. As if now our responses to that are supposed to be viewed not only out of context, but as hysterical.
Bacon: Yes. And I would say MAGA and Woke 1.0 are being cast as polarized opposites. Oh, I hadn’t thought of it that way. That’s a good way to put it.
McGregor: So that’s one of the ways that I think about it.
Bacon: Shannon, thank you for joining me. I appreciate it. Where can people find your work?
McGregor: I’m on the internet. You can Google me. My work is available on Google Scholar, and much of it is linked to on my Bluesky.
Bacon: Good. Shannon McGregor, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. Good to see you.
McGregor: Thanks, Perry. Always good to talk to you. Bye.
Bacon: Bye-bye.
