Dr. Grabe: So over the past 40 years, polarization has increased more dramatically here in the United States than in eight other countries that that's been studied. Those include the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Germany, Norway, and Sweden. So, every decade our negativity, about other political parties and people who belong to those political parties, has increased by about 4.8 percentage points. 

So, at a very personal level, this means that when you identify with a certain political viewpoint and you're encountering someone who identifies with an opposing political party or opposing political viewpoint, that person is more different, more unlikable, and less approachable to you now than that person would have been a few decades ago.  

And the question is, at what point does it become impossible for us to talk and listen to each other in a civil way? Those are for sure the core conditions for a functioning marketplace of ideas, where the taste of the truth, or our acceptance of ideas, depends on the competition with one another. 

Brooklynn: Since you've talked a lot about the marketplace, especially in America, I was wondering, because of the increasing investment in corporations like Fox News and CNN, as well as print news like the New York Times, capitalism has, kind of, forced journalism into more of a business structure. 

And I was wondering since you were a part of a governmentally censored form of journalism if you see any similarities between them? And if there's corporation censorship between the very polarized political views on different media forms? Does that question make sense does? 

Dr. Grabe: Of course, you know that there are about five to six media companies, very large corporations that own just about all media that flows through our society. So, the answer to that is 100%. Yes, there is a very large corporate underbelly to information flow and the integrity of information flow in the United States and worldwide for that matter.  

There are about three to 400 news outlets that are focused on providing reliable and unbiased if you believe that can happen, information. The rest are absolutely focused on a political position or advancing a political position, and making money off of that. Of course, if you target news to a very specific group of people that have a very specific political point of view, you have a very nice market segment, they have a nice niche audience, to which you can market certain advertising.  

Right, so yeah, the breaking down of audiences into niche markets around political opinions is very much part of the new circulation system in the United States. So, the short answer to that is yes, and the problem, here again, is, it's not a very open, commercial marketplace, where there's really fierce competition.  

And, then you layer on top of that, you know, how a closing marketplace of ownership is also inhibiting a true marketplace of ideas because news flows from so few sources through the system. So, it's usually troubling, and I must say, social media and the internet neither of them really changed that reality up very much.  

Brooklynn: I’m curious if this ties into what you're talking about at the beginning of this podcast, where news and media are largely patriarchally and misogynistically driven between the sexualization of women and the negative shock value that most of our news outlets have. 

 Is that intersectional with the corporatization of news, as capitalism has also been founded upon these patriarchal and misogynistic values? Do you think those intersect at all, as it continues to go down this marketplace route? 

Dr. Grabe: I think I want to encourage you to become a graduate student and to put that very, very large picture together because it is a very difficult and macro approach to thinking about this, I think a very valid one. I can assure you I do not have the pieces of evidence to put this together in that way. 

I think I’ve, with fairly fine tweezers, gone in and pulled out little pieces of it and gave a little bit of insight into little pieces of it, but it's an excellent question and it's a macro question and, unfortunately, I don't think there are many people who work on very large ideas like that. It would take several careers consecutively to answer that question comprehensively with good evidence. But I think it's a very valid question. 

Veronica: Kind of bringing this back around to not only the people who make the news and who filter the news but the people that are consuming the news. In this new era of social media, people have had to adjust to the kind of an overwhelming media escape, some of which they believe they can trust, some of which they believe they can't trust. Through your research, have you been able to gauge how well people are adjusting to the digital era?  

Dr. Grabe: I often in teaching ask students to just step back and think for a few seconds, about that magnitude of information flow. You know, I compared it to a massive garden hose earlier, but the most awesome way to grasp how large that information tide is to know that more information is being created during the lifespan of millennials than in the entire history of Homo Sapiens that predates them. That is an absolutely breathtaking way to think about the fast flow of information.  

And, yes, to cope with that kind of gush of information takes adjustment. And it's very hard to tell for sure if we're doing okay with that. Within that information tide, the explosion of this information is a relatively new phenomenon. It's actually, this information is a very old phenomenon right, but social media as a delivery system has unprecedented elegance, unfortunately. So, the resilience of human beings against this vast amount of information with this information tucked into it is not very obvious at this point. But I’d like to mention a few areas where I do see hopeful signs.  

First, I think it's really interesting to take a look at the number of so-called slow media use movements. Movements where people are encouraged to consume media more thoughtfully and perhaps consume less of it. And that's a grassroots movement. There's also enormous interest in media literacy, you know, from nonprofit organizations. Citizen groups, individual parents, we see very large enrollment and interest in media literacy courses in the media school, for example.  

There's also remarkable progress in terms of these misinformation detection tools. It's a bit of an arms race. The information industry is quite prolific in designing tools and strategies for spreading false information online. But detection tools are being developed to identify these techniques. And these tools are available for free to the public, and I have to just say that our colleagues here at IU, in the Luddy school are really international leaders in building tools that can detect the suspicious flow of information. And ordinary citizens have access to them and can use them.  

There are also advances in social science research to understand human vulnerabilities. At cognitive levels, things like our individual thinking styles, our belief networks that we belong to, or our media our patterns, and these things all make us more release resilient to false information. So we're growing knowledge, we can proceed on two fronts; we can empower people with media literacy and detection tools, and on the other level that I think is inevitable, if we want to succeed, and yet be resilient, is policy. Yes, regulation.  

So, you know video platforms have not shown a loss in commitment to self-regulate, you know to filter harmful information flow through their platforms, and I'd say what I see from them are sporadic attempts. It will be very difficult for us, nationally or globally, to design and impose policies to regulate false information because it's so closely tied to our first amendment rights. The question is, though, should someone have the right to dis-inform members of society, to the point of extreme polarization, violence, or fatal health consequences? And so, I'd say for sure the social fabric has been stretched by false information flow through media.  

But, you know, fortunately, I think, human societies have been known to behave a little bit like spandex, right, it can stretch. And I do worry that we see a few small tears, but I’m optimistic that grass-roots community action in collaboration with science and careful policymaking could tame the tides of current and future info dynamics.