You can analyze these tendencies in terms of several different but mutually reinforcing patterns. One is distilled in the title of this Richard Hanania essay from 2021: “Liberals Read, Conservatives Watch TV.” Obviously, that’s an oversimplification, since conservatives also dominate the talk-radio dial, conservative book-buyers can drive best sellers and so on. But it seems fair to say that liberalism has more of a print culture and conservatism more of an oral one, shaped especially by the rhythms of televised infotainment, with its celebrity hosts, its heroes and villains of the week, and its partisan cheerleading. (Not that the Democrats don’t have their own partisan cheerleaders, but MSNBC doesn’t shape the left in the same way that Fox News does the right.) It might also be fair to say (as Hanania has argued in a different piece) that conservatives simply care somewhat less about politics overall — or at least its more granular aspects — and therefore constitute less of a natural audience for deep coverage of the kind that sustains much of the political press.
Much of this is connected to class divisions: Our political-ideological landscape is increasingly defined by polarization between populists and meritocrats, the working classes and the professional classes, and the more the Republican Party becomes the party of less educated Americans, the more it naturally reflects more mass-market media consumption patterns.
But then it’s also influenced by the intellectual shift I’ve written about frequently, where the political right has become the natural home for outsider narratives of all kinds, from healthy forms of skepticism to deeper paranoias. This means that even the subset of Republicans who consume the same media sources as professional-class liberals are more likely to read them through a strong hermeneutic of suspicion. And it means that the mass-media figures on the right who aren’t just partisan entertainers, who are trying to be in the ideas business, tend to be defined by an outsider or autodidact’s mentality, where they’re surfacing fringe ideas and voices and consistently defining themselves against whatever the establishment believes. (I’m thinking of figures as various as Glenn Beck, Tucker Carlson and the more unclassifiable but increasingly right-coded Joe Rogan.)
All of this creates a very different set of intellectual pressures than what you see at work in mainstream/center-left media. In liberal-leaning cultural institutions, as I argued last week, a mass audience is often the check on the more radical enthusiasms of the activist-academic core, and the great intellectual peril is an ideas-driven conformism within that core — a prison of ideological correctness where the doors are locked on the inside and guarded by would-be commissars.
In conservative culture, by contrast, the mass audience tends to be the source of conformist pressure, but the pressure is not so much to conform to a singular set of True Conservative ideas (we saw in both Donald Trump’s ascent and Carlson’s success how easily aspects of the catechism could be questioned) as to a set of television-ready narratives, tribal expectations, cults of personality and Manichaean readings of any given situation. And, crucially, this pressure seems to become more intense the bigger your audience gets, until one day you’re entertaining Sidney Powell on your show because that’s what the people want.