Understanding Conservatives Via Facebook

What Facebook can tell us about conservatives:

First the learned published theory:

Here's my theory.  Conservatives are a remarkably well-organized and tight-knit group. It's why every book from a conservative author shoots to the top of the best-seller list. It's why Fox News Channel's primetime programming regularly doubles that of its cable competition. It's why Rush Limbaugh has no talk radio equal among liberals. It's not terribly surprising then that organizational closeness extends to the digital space where conservative use Facebook to share stories/links from a handful of conservative websites.

Here is my theory. Supply and Demand.

When you have high demand and low supply people are anxious to access the low supply information and share it by lots of means ... Facebook, word of mouth, etc. 

Liberal media perspective on the web, cable, radio, etc is a saturated commodity. Liberals have NO need to post anything from "marginal sites", because NBC, CNN, NPR, NYT, HuffPo (which USED to be considered "left wing"), etc are FULL of any story with a liberal slant that they could possibly desire!  True, false, slanted, insane, etc ... ALL are completely available and easy to find. 

 Everyone always gets exactly the view they want AND MORE on the liberal view blasted at them 24x7 from EVERYWHERE! Even supposed "conservative media" STILL present the liberal view and generally just respond to it (like this blog). When a liberal outlet deigns to mention a conservative view, it is often castigated as being part of the "echo chamber" for even having mentioned the "false" view. 

If you add "conservative" and "moderate" together, 75% if US people identify as one or the other, where only 21% identify as liberal. (see Gallup data)

The book "Left Turn" is a very good attempt by  a couple of university professors, based on PEER REVIEWED RESEARCH (the magic wand!) to figure out:

1) Where the American people are relative to bias (like "40")
2) Where a bunch of media and institutions are
3)  Where our politicians are

Here are a couple of charts from that book 

Basically, Joe Lieberman was about a 75, most Americans cluster around 40, standard MSM is around 70, and Fox is like 50.

So there is my "supply and demand theory" ... or the other guy and Hillary could be right and there is a highly organized right wing conspiracy that is taking these things and in an organized way posting them on FB!

You make the call.


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