Matthew Yglesias has a lovely chart showing the change in public opinion towards women’s role in society.
Dawn Friedman, the godmother of all mommybloggers, has a piece on PJM on being a pro-choice adoptive parent.
Slow day at work? Watch 150 Monty Python sketches. (via Dooce)
Brooks is worrying about the growing racial segregation of music taste. He says never has alternative music been so white. Not. I don’t think remember a whole of lot of urban youth running out to buy REM’s Murmur
Apt. 11d 
Laura, on the Friedman piece you linked above, I’m wondering about your take on these two excerpts: “I believe that ultimately our experience of pregnancy is about context” and “I strongly believe that her commitment to the daughter we share is made more meaningful because it was not forced upon her.”
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Cates. I don’t really discuss abortion on this blog, because others in the blogosphere are pros on this topic and because of a lot of other reasons. However, I do link to bloggers who present some interesting insight on the topic one way or another. I liked how Dawn tried to bring together the interests of infertility crowd and the pro-choice crowd, because they are usually at odds.
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I see. Thanks for the response, Laura.
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This may be outside Laura’s comfort zone, but there’s starting to be an interesting debate on the question on paternal choice. The question is, why are men expected to pay child support for children they never wanted? Women get lots of legal choices–keep, abort, adopt, turn over to foster care, etc. Men, however, are expected to shut up and pay the bills–there’s no way to “terminate” your paternity, short of the ever popular beat-girlfriend-until-she-miscarries, and I believe that loophole is closing in a lot of states. I don’t actually have any sympathy for the whiny dudes who have been quoted in the media, but it is an interesting inconsistency. The natural impulse is to tell these guys “You made your choice when you chose to have sex,” but a lot of people wouldn’t care to have that addressed to women. I know the usual arguments about how the physical demands of expectant fatherhood and expectant motherhood are different, but 18 years of financial bondage is pretty harsh, too. Babies aside, if I were told I’d have the choice of nine months of nausea, fatigue, and weight gain, versus 18 years of substantial monthly payments, I’d take the nine months every time.
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(Brooks wrote something unreliable? Next thing you’ll tell me that it’s possible to spend more than $20 at Red Lobster after all…)
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That Issenberg piece is pretty brutal, but seems fair. Bobos in Paradise is painfully accurate in its description of upper-middle class elite taste of the 90s/early 00s. I read it with a lot of enjoyment, but with discomfort at what a good fix Brooks had on me and my class, then mailed it to my relatives who run tourist businesses in Red America, with the hope that it would allow them to aim better at their target customer who is looking for nubby textures, authenticity, and spiritual awakenings that you can put on Visa. I haven’t read his work comparing Montgomery County and Franklin County, but I heard about it at the time, and I remember thinking that Brooks seemed to have done a driveby. It could have been a worthy project, but it would have required going farther afield and spending more time, perhaps a year to soak up impressions, followed by a second year to write it all up properly.
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very good
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Thank you, Doug, for linking the Issenberg article. As a native Texan now living in NY, it certainly rang true for me.
I am frequently amused and disheartened by New Yorkers’ views of what Red Staters are supposed be like. This Brooks quote reflects the attitude I often observe when they are confronted with actual facts about regional demographics: “That would be interesting, but one goes by one’s life experiences.” Yeah, well, I think their “experiences” might be dominated by what is presented in the mainstream media.
Now we’re even learning that the Democrats are the party of the rich.
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Hey Tex, chack this out.
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Wendy,
Isn’t it true that there is an ongoing bifurcation of Democratic voters, with the party representing both high income highly educated progressives (like yourself) and low income, poorly educated voters? As I’ve mentioned, I don’t think this is sustainable–eventually (or now, for that matter) there is going to be conflict between the economic interests of the two groups. We see it even today with education (I could produce a dozen proof quotes from 11D and Megan McArdle comment threads). Fortunately (or unfortunately) poor Democrats have no idea to what degree they’re getting the shaft.
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It does appear that those who are spinning the “party of the rich” story as “new” news might be guilty of overstating it a bit (ya’ think?). I don’t believe either party has had a monopoly on the rich in recent years.
A good question is which one is the party of the middle class.
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Immigration is another issue where the interests of the rich and the interests of the rest of Americans are opposed, although this is obviously a bipartisan phenomenon . A large, constant stream of poor, low-skill immigrants keeps down the costs of the elite lifestyle (nannies, yard work, housecleaning, restaurant workers), at the same time reducing the bargaining power and reducing the value of the labor of unskilled American workers, particularly African-Americans. And don’t they know it. Given the volume of the protests aroused by “comprehensive immigration reform” a few months ago, I think there’s definitely room for a savvy presidential candidate to run on immigration and border security.
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It has been argued that for many years the poor have already been getting shafted by policies intended to help them. The expansion of welfare comes to mind as an example. I guess that the ongoing disagreements about cause and effect of these policies allow them to continue indefinitely. Education is a good example.
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Amy, you’re conflating terms again. There is high income, and there is rich. I have no assets, but I have (moderately) high income in an expensive area of the country (our mortgage is 2.5 times our household income).
That’s not what people like Tex and the purveyors of that wingnut meme mean when they call the Democrats the “party of the rich” so glibly.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being in online fandom, it’s that there’s little difference between people in “red” states and people in “blue” states other than that for some reason people in “red” states are more likely to believe the crap on Fox News.
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Wendy,
2.5 times income is excellent these days for a mortgage in a high-cost area. Congratulations! (We rent a house from the university at $1,000 a month, and are on course to buy a house in four years.)
I think Tex and I know exactly what we are talking about–I think we both mean high-income. Acknowledging that one is rich is an important step. (Hi! My name’s Amy and my household income is over 3x the local household average in an economically depressed area where I recently saw a house on Craigslist for under $10K, and past record holders have been offered at $12K or two for $30K. Not that you’d want to live there.) I’m well off, you’re well off–we are the rich people that we and everybody else talk about.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being in online fandom, it’s that there’s little difference between people in “red” states and people in “blue” states other than that for some reason people in “red” states are more likely to believe the crap on Fox News.”
You’ve got the first half of that mostly right. I’ve noticed something similar at thehousingbubbleblog.com, where there is certainly a lot of fraternal feeling among the bubble heads, who are divided as to who they blame most for the debacle, Republicans or Democrats. As to your red brethren’s peculiarity in believing what they hear on Fox, don’t you think it’s possible that you yourself have beliefs which might seem to them to defy all common sense?
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Also, could you avoid using language like “wingnut meme”? It’s not exactly an invitation to dialogue.
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Amy, we have been one crisis away from disaster for most of the 16 years of my marriage, up until about this past March. You’ll forgive me for seeing myself as firmly in the middle class.
But your definition of “rich” is not what the study that Tex et al referred to means by rich:
“key measure of each district’s wealth was the number of single-filer taxpayers earning more than $100,000 a year and married couples filing jointly who earn more than $200,000 annually, [Michael Franc of the Heritage Foundation] said.”
That may describe your household, but it doesn’t describe mine by a longshot.
Please read the blog post I linked to, and it will explain why Democrats are not the “party of the rich” but instead simply the majority party these days, thanks to the utter failure of the Republican Party under a Bush administration.
Re “wingnut meme”: sorry, my frustration at the repeated denial of such things as facts got to me. I’m kind of sick of people mollycoddling right wing people as simply “having a different opinion.” As Stephen Colbert says, facts have a liberal bias these days.
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Wendy,
The future holds all sorts of unpleasant things. In the short term, we’re looking at inflation, the housing meltdown, and recession. In the long term, we’re looking at 30-40 years of low and high-intensity conflict with Islamic radicals. It’s already been 28 years since the Iran hostage crisis and there’s no end in sight. I agree that the short-term stuff could have been handled a lot better (like by not creating a credit bubble after 9/11), but the long term picture was going to be hairy no matter what, with a lot of dead ends and mistakes. Maybe when the oil in the Middle East runs out Saudi-funded radicalism will peter out, but the end of oil is not a day that I’m looking forward to with much enthusiasm. (By the way, I was watching A Bridge Too Far a week ago and I highly recommend it. The movie covers the true story of a huge botched Allied offensive in the Netherlands during WWII that cost the lives of 2,000 Allied soldiers in the course of about a week. The Allies made a lot of mistakes throughout the War (overconfidence leading to the Battle of the Bulge, the fall of Singapore, the extremely dubious assault on Iwo Jima, etc.) and were up against fanatically determined opponents, but eventually won. We do ourselves a disservice by forgetting all the setbacks and blunders of WWII.)
“As Stephen Colbert says, facts have a liberal bias these days.”
I’m heartily sick of that quote, especially since it’s transparently false. There are such Orwellian overtones in quoting this, forgetting the catastrophes that American liberalism has facilitated over the years: multi-generational welfare dependency, the destruction of communities through urban renewal, the creation of massive crime-ridden housing projects, progressive pedagogy with a million excuses for why poor kids aren’t learning, not to mention the harm done by glorifying single parenthood and divorce. There’s an awful lot of truth in various evil conservative platitudes like “children need a mom and dad,” and social science is still catching up with grandma. Just recently, familyscholars.org quoted a Washington Post article that said “Children living in households with unrelated adults are nearly 50 times as likely to die of inflicted injuries as children living with two biological parents, according to a study of Missouri abuse reports published in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2005.”
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. . . there’s little difference between people in “red” states and people in “blue” states other than that for some reason people in “red” states are more likely to believe the crap on Fox News.
Oh, but why are red staters more likely to believe Fox New “crap” and blue staters believe CBS “crap”? Something is different there. Perhaps in the abstract many basic values are shared, bur maybe our varying experiences inform us very differently about how we can achieve our shared goals.
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Now I’m intrigued for my family to watch A Bridge Too Far. Although, I’ve never been one for war movies.
Trying to imagine today’s media covering the many setbacks of WWII makes me more optimistic about our situation today. Although the average citizen was not well informed about the mistakes made by Allied forces as WWII raged on, history tells us that this is how wars are typically fought. Leaders are not always brilliant and free of destructive political agendas, thoughtfully conceived military strategies frequently fail and many soldiers die in vain. Despite the horrific mistakes and incompetence associated with the Iraq war, I don’t think we should believe all is lost for winning the war against radical Islamic terrorism.
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Tex,
You really should watch A Bridge Too Far (Patton is good, too, but you’ve probably seen that). It’s a bit long and I don’t care for the American characters, but it’s a lavish all-star production and widely praised for historical accuracy. Certain historical lessons jump out at you–for instance the way that for Operation Market Garden to succeed, absolutely everything had to go exactly as planned. The plan was for paratroopers to take a crucial bridge near the German border, and then hold it while tanks and infantry moved up a single narrow road through enemy territory to reinforce them. At least in the movie, the Germans took a while to figure out what was going on–initially they couldn’t believe that the Allies could be so stupid.
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I haven’t read it recently, but I really enjoyed Catch 22 as a high school student. Bill Mauldin’s WWII cartoons also give a flavor of what it was like, but I haven’t seen a lot of his work. I also haven’t read it recently, but I think Slaughterhouse 5 is way, way overrated.
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One of these days Laura’s going to start charging me rent, but I have to add that WWII was a lot grittier on the American side than we care to remember it, at least judging from my grandpa’s war stories (he’s 86 now and was an infantry medic who landed at Normandy on D-day plus 1). According to Grandpa, as a medic he spent much of his time in the UK before the Normandy invasion treating GIs with VD cases (oh, the NYT articles you could write with that material today!). Later on he served alongside a chaplain who made use of his privileges and his army-assigned jeep to zip around ransacking abandoned farmhouses and sending boxes of loot back to the US. (The chaplain had a surname that was either German or German-Jewish, so it’s unclear to me which religious tradition he was discrediting.)
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“I don’t think we should believe all is lost for winning the war against radical Islamic terrorism.”
Does anyone believe this?
I think that Iraq is a major distraction from what we ought to be doing, that it has been since the administration started pulling troops from Afghanistan in 2002 to get ready to send them to Iraq, that it will be for the rest of the 420 days that the present administration will remain in office, and for too long into the next administration.
Next September 11th will be seven years, and it looks like bin Laden will still be free. That is just part of the Bush legacy.
(WWII in Europe on the Western Front was no walk in the park, but the Eastern Front… This summer I read Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 by Catherine Merridale. Here it is in three sentences, from one of the survivors: “They called us. They trained us. They killed us.” Though I expect Amy knows all about this.)
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Doug,
I don’t know much more than I learned from Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. The stuff I remember from there is Stalin’s untimely purge of the Soviet officer corps just before WWII, machine guns set up behind front-line soldiers to keep them fighting, the insistence that a good soldier would commit suicide rather than surrender, and the assumption that any Soviet soldier who spent time as a POW must be a spy.
Oh, and here’s a bonus historical parallel: the Allies were convinced that the German atomic project was much more developed than it turned out to be, and were surprised to discover that it was actually a primitive, one-horse affair. It was so backward that Heisenberg was able to plausibly insist that he had been sabotaging the project. (I was watching a documentary on Heisenberg last night.)
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But, there’s at least one study that shows that people who get their news primarily from Fox news have patently false opinions about the world:
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/international_security_bt/102.php?nid=&id=&pnt=102&lb=brusc
So, we progressives/liberals/blue staters/NPR listeners/whatever you want to call us (well, maybe not whatever you want to call us) tend to believe that Fox watchers in the red states are either unconsciously deluding themselves (the cognitive dissonance theory) or are incapable of absorbing and analyzing large amounts of information (I’ll avoid naming that theory to try to be politically correct).
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Amy, I don’t know how you got into talking about WWII. You’ve created a strawperson argument–no one was saying anything about WWII. I will take your total digression as a concession to my point that the Democrats are not the party of the rich. 🙂
I have a thought about argument analysis/evidence/etc. (relating to the w****** meme) but I will post it to my blog later after I complete the list of 15 YES FIFTEEN things I must do today. One of these things is to bake a birthday cake for a Webkinz. *facepalm* Hey, I can’t do it tomorrow!
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Wendy,
My point was that there is nothing unique about any military mistakes the US has made over the past few years. Any military buff (which I’m unfortunately not) could give you pages of examples. Likewise, Bush is not uniquely horrible when compared to a number of presidents we regard as icons and models for contemporary leaders. Consider for instance FDR’s grossly unconstitutional court-packing scheme and his various covert projects (for instance the Flying Tigers) that involved the US in military action against the Axis without proper congressional authorization. If a conservative Republican were to try to pull of something like the court packing scheme, you’d be talking about how a dark night of fascism was falling on the US, and you might be right, too.
As I said upthread, we are looking at 30-40 years of unpleasantness–sporadic Islamic violence, coupled with the dying of the old petroleum-based economy. No matter which party is in power, it’s going to be a rocky ride. I hope we make it.
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bj,
Doesn’t it matter who is asking the questions and what the questions are?
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bj,
I just looked at the page you cited. The al Qaeda links to Iraq question is highly debatable, and it really shouldn’t have gone onto the questionnaire. A fairer survey would have included fantasies on the other side as well (fire doesn’t melt steel, Bush planned 9/11, etc.). There’s some crazy, crazy stuff going on out there.
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Amy, but I never said anything about the military. You brought it up. It’s all a distraction from the fact that the Democrats are not really “the party of the rich.” That kind of glib label really irked me, especially since it is apparently a w****** meme. Repeat it enough times, and people will think it’s true.
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Tex?
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Well, I would I’ll admit that my point would be substantially undermined if 80% of NPR/PBS listeners believed that “fire doesn’t melt steel.” or “Bush planned 9/11.” (Can you give me a third so that we can make the statistics parallel?). By all means, I agree that a similar poll containing the mis -perceptions that you think are more likely to be held by liberals should be done.
The three questions in the World Public Opinion report are:
1) Is it your impression that the US has or has not found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam Hussein was working closely with the al Qaeda terrorist organization?
US Has:
Fox: 67% NPR: 16%
2) Since the war with Iraq ended, is it your impression that the US has or has not found Iraqi weapons of mass destruction?
US Has:
Fox: 33% NPR: 11%
3) Thinking about how all the people in the world feel about the US having gone to war with Iraq, do you think:
The majority of people favor the US having gone to war.
Fox: 35% NPR: 5%
How can I relate this to the meme that Democrats are the “party of the rich?” Well, it relates ’cause people (who watch FOX news, and presumably, read certain blog sources, can think they’re right and be completely delusional. As Wendy points out the article on Dems being the party of the rich is absolutely meaningless. Half of the wealthiest half of districts are represented by Republicans (oh yeah, and the same thing is true about Dems)– classic “FOXisms”, misrepresentations of facts that feed misperceptions.
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PS: Can’t help but note the irony of “since the war with Iraq ended” The poll and analysis was done after the “Mission [was] Accomplished.”
bj
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bj,
I don’t have polls, but I can imagine lots of alternate exercises and questions: 1) given a list of US racial and ethnic groups, order them by average IQ score 2) Does cohabitation improve the chances of marital success? 3) Does raising tax rates always increase revenue? 4) Should the government increase the minimum wage to $20 an hour? 5) Can the government keep gas prices down? 6) What rights does the Second Amendment cover? 7) Is a wall between church and state mentioned in the Constitution? Etc. You could lift a bunch more questions from that ISI civics test. My feeling is that results would show that the politically committed would test fairly well, while moderates are just barely smart enough to tie their shoes (that’s basically what that infamous study of number of books read suggested).
For the record, I don’t watch Fox or any other TV news regularly, and from what I see while traversing airports, CNN has become an abomination. I also don’t think it makes sense to compare Fox viewers to NPR listeners, any more than it would make sense to compare NPR listeners to National Review readers–the medium and the size of the audience is different. It would be much more sensible to compare Fox viewers to CNN viewers.
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Oooh! Commenter slugfest! Actually, one of the things I think is really swell about 11D (thank you salon proprietor Laura) is the generally even tone and focus on what would work. That said, I think it is good for Doug to have to make the effort to listen to AmyP, and for AmyP to have to make the effort to listen to Doug – and Wendy, bj.
Now, as a moderate, AmyP, I do think I am doing okay on the shoe-tying… the missus and I cohabited for three years before we married, we are now married for seventeen years and have three kids. We think we’re successful. Cohabitation gave us the confidence that we could make a marriage work. Your mileage may differ, obviously.
But it does seem to me that their friends at school who are not from intact marriages are less secure and smooth in their dealings with others than the ones whose families are married.
I do NOT buy ‘facts have a liberal bias’ have about the same reaction AmyP had.
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Amy: Your questions show the information divide here — the questions in the World Opinion Poll are very clearly worded to have correct and incorrect answers (is there a legitimate group that argues that the “US has found _clear _evidence in Iraq that Sadam Hussein was working _closely_ with the al Quaeda terrorist organization”
Unlike your original questions (“fire can melt steel), only some of your questions can arguably have factual answers, and they’d have to be considerably revised to get a clear consensus, even of experts. Do you think NPR listeners are going to be wronger than FOX viewers on those questions? Again, we’re having a discussion about something that is not a matter of opinion. We may not have the data, but it is a testable hypothesis to try to answer whether viewers of different media sources are more or less likely to have correct factual information.
In the article, they actually do try to correct for demographic differences in the viewership of different sources. The article is a first foray into an important topic: how our media sources are correlated with our access to factual information. Noting a relationship wouldn’t show causation (the viewers could be different, the media could be different, there could be complex interactions among different variables). But, the first article is pretty dramatic. I look forward to seeing more (and hopefully some coming from academic sources that meet research based, rather than journalism based, standards).
Hey — Laura, I feel like we’re drifting into the area that’s actually within your field of expertise (poltics/media) (I think). I’d love to see more discussion of the topic of media and the transmission of information.
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Thanks, dave. I really like the commenters here can talk/fight amongst themselves, when I walk away from the computer.
In today’s media class, I showed colbert’s speach at the 2006 white house correspondence dinner. Love the line, “reality has a well known liberal bias.” It really is just a joke, amy.
OK, there are actual studies that look at people’s ability to discern truth from lies. Guess what? Liberals are more able to pick out lies from conservatives, but can’t pick out the lies from liberals (ie “I did not have sex with that woman.”). And conservatives can pick out lies that clash with their ideology, but can’t pick out lies that gel with their ideology.
We’re all idiots.
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Oh, and yes to cohabitation, personally (though not for very long), and next year will be our 20th wedding anniversary. But, if you asked me “Does evidence on the duration of marriage show that cohabitation increases the duration of marriages?” My NPR-listening response would be no.
What is “the facts have a liberal bias” supposed to mean anyway? I do believe, for a variety of reasons, that much decision making among conservatives (not theoretical conservatives but, our current administration and those who support them) are being made on a factually incorrect basis. I believe (as the World Opinion study shows) that people who voted for Bush in 2004 did so through a set of false assumptions about the world (more likely than chance). Is that what the quip is supposed to mean?
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Ftr, I’m not a politics/media expert, only an English professor. 😉 I was really only referring to the specific refutation of the w****** meme. People can *say* “the Democrats are the party blah blah blah” all they want, but it’s not true. Republicans would like it to be true, but the facts contradict them.
I wouldn’t agree with Laura that we’re all idiots so much as I’d observe that it’s very normal of people to want to believe people we agree with. If I ever got a second PhD it would be in social psychology, concentrating on the phenomenon of “groupthink” because it’s something I observe again and again in real-life situations as well as in online fandom. I will confess: I believed Clinton when he said he didn’t have sex with “that woman.” I totally get what Laura is saying. But I also have tried to train myself never to accept anything at face value and do the research. We’ve come to rely too much on lazy thinking skills.
And in fact, I am going to spend a large part of my persuasive writing course coming up working on the issue of information literacy (yes, I used the buzzword) and persuasion. I’m also going to try to update my blog daily to talk about what I’m doing, keep a record of successes and failures. I’m going to introduce my students to several Web 2.0 tools, if I can, and they’ll be spending half their time in the computer lab writing or reading. The lab has “Vision” software so I can not only see if they’re looking at Facebook but I can also broadcast it to the entire class. Heh.
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Here’s the Colbert press conference w/the reality/liberal bias quip. http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=4931165
Here’s a funny remix of the Dean Scream and the Chappelle spoof. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aISqoUskxIU
Showed both of them in class today. Yes, I’m shamelessly fishing for high scores on Rate My Professor.
Ooh. Let me write a post about marriage and cohabitation. We can riff off the Coontz opinion piece in today’s times.
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dave s.,
Sorry! Friendly fire! (I’m moderate on many issues, too–meaning apathetic and ill-informed.)
bj, laura, and dave.s:
Forgive me if I don’t look up all my cites on cohabitation. The following is what I can remember. I believe the consensus is that contrary to popular belief, cohabitation does not improve the chance of a marriage succeeding. Whether or not cohabitation harms the chance of a marriage succeeding is a murkier issue. Interestingly, a single cohabitation followed by marriage seems to work OK, although the quality of communication and interaction suffers to some degree. Also interestingly, the real problems seem to come for people who have cohabitated with more than the person they ultimately marry. This is strange, because you’d think that they should have had the benefit of choosing between partners and selecting the best option, rather than plunging in and marrying in haste the first person they bought a sofa with. However, that’s not how it works–the multiple cohabitators have a high divorce rate, whereas the one-time cohabitators get off nearly unscathed. An added wrinkle is that cohabitators grow more accepting of divorce over the course of their cohabitation, so it’s not just a question of selection.
My husband teaches this material in detail in a class on the philosophy of love and sex. When we lived in DC, he had a lot of frustration, because he’d teach this stuff, and it just didn’t make any dent on his undergraduates. Apparently the cognitive dissonance was just too great–it’s just so engrained in the popular imagination that cohabitation is safer, that it somehow improves the chance of marital success. Mere facts and studies don’t have any impact. We’re in Texas, now, and it’s a different world. He hasn’t taught the love and sex class yet, but I’m dying to see how it goes in a completely different cultural environment. There are incredible numbers of bridal magazines at the grocery store, and I’ve encountered at least one SAHM wife of a graduate student, lots of married undergraduates, as well as several married undergraduate moms and expectant undergraduates. Perhaps a revamped version of the course will mention that 23 (???) is the magic age for brides after which there is a rather better chance of marital success. (I got married a couple months shy of that, but it was at the end of my first year of graduate school. Oh well.)
As to the benefits of cohabitation, I don’t know how far it gets you, really, because I’m pretty sure that parenthood (especially of two or more kids) is where things get sticky. At this point, I can’t even quite imagine what childless couples find to argue about. Plus, until we had two kids, we had no idea how selfish and lazy we both were. Of course, now we’ve got a yard, the laziness is clear both to ourselves and the whole block (darn leaves–we’ve already filled about 36 bags).
In general, I think conservatives are on very strong ground on family issues. The picture I get from reading familyscholars.org (which is not precisely conservative, by the way), is that the biological family is like an egg. It’s very strong until you manage to crack it, and then quite fragile.
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We can speculate endlessly on why the cohabitation studies for the US look like they do. My suspicion is that a first unsuccessful cohabitation functions like a first unsuccessful marriage, lowering the chance of success of a subsequent relationship.
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I’d be interested to see how cohabitation studies shake out over the next few years. When I moved in with my now-husband, my liberal, easygoing mom was a little upset. That was back in 1990. What I think is that living together has become much more socially acceptable, which is going to change the cohort a bit from people who rebel and do something against society’s expectations (thrillseekers may not be successful in marriage, ultimately) to people just going about their everyday business.
I know so few people in my age range who have divorced, though. Everyone I know who lived together first didn’t have ulterior motives (escaping a bad situation at home, trying to keep a relationship going). It was more like, I really love you and want to share my everyday life with you. And then they get married when they want to have kids. Maybe it’s a characteristic of my demographic.
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I watch Fox News predominantly and I would not switch to CBS or CNN based on one WPO study, although it certainly brings up some valid points. I did notice the study found very little difference between the misperceptions of Fox & CBS viewers. I would think including Limbaugh in the survey might have been a better outlet to compare to NPR. Rush listeners have scored highly knowledgeable in at least a couple of Pew surveys, along with members of NPR & O’Reilly audience. Also, I agree the the question about a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq is debatable.
It can certainly be argued that the recent labeling of the Democrats as the “party of the rich” is exaggerated rhetoric. However, subtle insinuations and outright claims that the Republicans are the party of the rich that doesn’t care for poor people have been have been common among the MSM and Democratic politicians for many years. How much truth is behind those insinuations? Has it been based on feelings or facts? My personal experience has been that it’s more commonly feelings.
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Amy —
I find your descriptions of the cultural differences between your previous residence (DC?) and Texas very interesting. I’m living the reverse experience. In particular, your husband’s move to a Texas school seems to be bringing up some fascinating differences.
I’m lamenting a bit that my own children will likely attend college in the northeast. They’ve lived all their lives here in NY, and I can see how this culture shapes their outlook in a way that is somewhat provincial. Funny how that works.
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I should add that I’m not a strong defender of all Fox News programming. Currently, for instance, they seem to be spending a lot of time sensationally rehashing the sad Natalie Holloway story. I just stepped off my elliptical machine and turned off a Fox News feature on the lone surviving Munchkin from the Wizard of Oz movie. ???
Anyway, maybe many of those surveyed Fox News viewers were spending a lot of their time watching “murdered blondes” types of stories. That could help explain the results. 🙂
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Tex: what are you saying that you would say that the “US has found _clear _evidence in Iraq that Sadam Hussein was working _closely_ with the al Quaeda terrorist organization” ? Honestly, that statement is not debatable; they tried hard to write it that way. Without the closely and clear (if that changed to any), it might turn debatable, as it’s written, it’s not. Right now you’re just being the example anecdote for the study (FOX watchers). I have seen the study that says that Limbaugh watchers are knowledgeable — which is interesting. That data suggests the possibility that it’s the news source that has resulted in the mistaken assumptions, rather than the population or the biases (though it’s also possible that Limbaugh watchers are a different population).
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bj,
“Closely” and “clearly” are open to interpretation.
Laura,
You’re quite right about the ability to detect lies on the other side, and the inability to detect lies from ones own side. Take for example the case of Stephen Glass, or any similar figure who makes up stories that go unchallenged because they flatter readers’ prejudices. Fortunately, the internet is making life more difficult for these people.
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