By Tom Ganser
Correspondent
During the eighth lecture in the 2013 Fairhaven Lecture Series on Oct. 28, Dick Haven led his audience on a fast-paced 53 minute field trip exploring “American Political Discourse Since 1983: The Impact of Cable TV, Email, Twitter, Facebook and Other Technology Innovations.”
Haven is also a frequent guest on WFAW Morning Magazine, the Wisconsin Public Radio Ideas Network and NBC 15 in Madison.
To set the stage, Haven quizzed his audience of about 55 regarding nine events since 1980 that have profoundly changed how news is communicated and shared, including the Federal Communication Commission’s overturning of the 1949 Fairness Doctrine in 1987, the premiere of Fox News in 1999 and the introduction of Facebook in 2004.
Taking a look at television news on ABC, NBC and CBS during the 1950s to 1970s, Haven described those news sources as having had a “unifying effect” on the population at large because most people were exposed to the same news.
Today, the availability of news 24 hours a day and from hundreds of sources has had the opposite effect. “We are divided in ways that are more caustic,” Haven said. “We’re also isolated more.”
Haven also pointed out several ways in which the targets for television and radio news and for political discourse have changed from large mass audiences with a wide range of characteristics to smaller and far more homogenous segments of the American audience that share many of the same characteristics and beliefs.
This narrowing of the intended audiences for news and political discourse, coupled with the emergence of the World Wide Web (especially blogs) and the dramatic increase in social networks (up from 37 percent of American adults in 2008 to 69 percent in 2012), has resulted in “echo chambers.”
With the segmenting of audiences and so many different modes of communication outlets now available, Haven said, “We’ve been seeing audiences choosing what they want to listen to because it reinforces what they already think. It’s an echo. … And [they] become more certain because that’s all they hear.”
The dramatic change of news sources from the evening news show on the major TV networks in the 1970s to the prominence of Facebook (one trillion page views in the month of June 2011) and Twitter (500 million registered users in 2012 who posted 340 million tweets per day), has created a new political dialogue.
“It takes the power of political messaging away from the mass media model,” according to Haven, “and places it firmly into peer-to-peer public discourse.”
Haven suggested that audience segmenting, the elimination of the “Fairness Doctrine” requiring equal time for different opinions and the reinforcing nature of the “echo chamber” effect have paved the way for the ideologues and pundits, rather than journalists, to dominate talk radio and many segments of cable television today.
“An ideologue,” Haven observed, “is someone who says, ‘My ideology is the right way. Now, let’s look at the world.’”
Another consequence of the expansion of communication technology, with cameras and recording devices everywhere, Haven warned, is moving closer and closer to the “end of private speech.”
In his closing remarks, Haven suggested that enhanced audience segmenting and enhanced electronic communication, along with the forum for ideological extremes that they can provide, has encouraged “emotional tirades instead of reasoned conversation” and the dangerous growth of “conflict over compromise.”
All lectures are free and open to the public and are held on every Monday through Dec. 2 at 3 p.m. in the Fellowship Hall of Fairhaven Retirement Community, 435 West Starin Rd., Whitewater. Street parking is adjacent to the building.
Links to videos of lectures, including those from prior series, can be found at http://www.uww.edu/contedu/fairhaven.
