vivian shaw

Global Media in Perspective (paper from June 2009)

Are Democrats Better Readers? False Difference in Readability Among Major U.S. News Brands

Shortly following the results of the 2004 Presidential election, a crop of secession-themed groups popped up on Facebook. The purpose of this proposed secession was for the Northeast and West Coast, the regions that had voted primarily for Senator John Kerry, to escape the majority-politics of the conservative South, Southwest, and Midwest. Young liberals were deeply resentful of conservative voting, particularly frustrated with the “stupidity” of the lower and middle classes of conservative America who voted according to their religious associations, thereby ignoring what they might gain economically and politically with liberal policy.

News media, both liberal and conservative, is extremely concerned with this apparent disconnect between individuals’ political ideologies and their actual political needs. Trusted brands such as the New York Times, USA Today, and Fox News each parlay their own interpretation of what readers and society-at-large should know to live productively and fully. I use the word “brand” intentionally because individual news sources do not behave simply as filters for information but rather as lifestyles to be consumed by their readers—respective to my list above, political and economic worldviews that are “liberal,” “moderate,” and “conservative.” We can picture, for example, that Jo-hanna, a junior at Swarthmore College and aspiring legislative aide, relies daily on the New York Times to keep connected with the world, while tacitly avoiding the Wall Street Journal and its right-leaning biases. Across the cultural divides and despite the segmentation of loyalties, our country overall accepts and commits to the idea that news brands are distinct from each other.

I examined this idea by reviewing a small sample of articles about Senator John Kerry—polarizing loser of the 2004 election—and his comments in 2006 on the relationship between education and “getting stuck in Iraq.” What I found surprised me, and made me truly question the significance of brand distinction among mainstream media sources and what broader implications may exist for different types of readers across our shared America. Considering adult literacy and the reality of disparate reading abilities across various groups in the United States, I had predicted that the reading levels of the reportage would vary widely based on the political orientation of the news source—moderate and conservative newspapers tongue-clucking in terms of black and white while liberal news sources defended Kerry in sophisticated and nuanced wordsmith. This could potentially explain how easily the liberal brand—associated as intelligent, elite, and secular—may turn off much of Middle America, despite overlapping benefit from left-leaning fiscal and military policy. I assumed that the reputed easy readability of moderate and conservative newspapers was fundamental to attracting readers to a conservative Republican, anti-elitist lifestyle.

I was surprised to find that the reading accessibility of the reportage did not directly correlate to increased “rightness” of the newspapers. Using the Flesch-Kincaid measure of readability, the Washington Post’s articles on the subject of the original remarks and then Kerry’s subsequent apology were written at 9.8th and 13.7th reading levels, respectively. On the other hand, USA Today covered the story at reading levels of grades 11.0 and 10.9. The clearest relationship in reading accessibility for this example, in fact, could be seen with the segmentation of the topic—original stories describing Kerry’s so-called botched joke tended to be more difficult to read than coverage of his apology. (See my full list analyzing readability of 15 stories from 11 news sources on page 5.) Very generally, there is a decline in readability difficulty from left news sources to right, but the relationship is pretty minor. However, this does not mean that the small differences are unimportant—rather, I believe a very real and poignant discovery can come from these observations. And that is that the reputed and perceived accessibility of a news source, supported by a very marginal widening to different reading abilities, may be enough to attract the loyalties of readers who feel disenfranchised by an elite, overly-educated establishment.

The conclusion I draw from this small sample is that given the reality that the average American reads at an eighth grade reading level¹, all of these newspapers—left to right—write at levels far exceeding sizable portions of our nation’s adult population. From this perspective, the differences in reading and cultural accessibility of newspapers may be most significant at the level of brand reputation. How brand reputation plays into reader confidence and aversions may be based principally on individual reader’s experiences and interpretations of his/her community’s worldview. Thus, as in my earlier reference to the 2004 election, the actions people make in response to information probably tend to be fundamentally tied to the subcultures in which they grow and live—not on a random news organization’s perception of what is best for them.

On a personal note, I do not believe that it is necessarily bad or unwise for readers and people in general to make decisions based on cultural knowledge and information. Perhaps, human loyalty to our social groups is needed for survival—to preserve the spirit that defies and challenges global systems that domineer over our own. If the news believes in its integrity and potential to inform citizens of all stripes and thereby check large-scale systems of oppression, it needs to do better. As it stands now, the media’s simultaneous promotion of news brands as significantly different and failure to accommodate low-literate readers de facto serves the function of excluding, rather than empowering, culturally traditional and educationally disadvantaged populations.

^{1 According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), adult literacy takes into account the different educational experiences of groups across the country and measures literacy on social and personal functionality rather than grade levels. However, an Adult Health Literacy Training I recently attended at the Literacy Assistance Center reported that the average American adult reads at an eighth grade reading level.}

Case Study: 15 Stories by 11 News Brands: Comparing Readability