I see it all the time in people close to me, on both sides of the aisle. The more news they consume, the more they paint the other side as a villain or a cartoon of evil.
There is a study behind the impression. In 2019 More in Common and YouGov asked 2,100 Americans what they believed and what they thought the other party believed. Democrats and Republicans imagined almost twice as many extremists among their opponents as there really are. The authors call the distance the perception gap.
The sharpest finding is about news. “The more news people consumed, the larger their Perception Gap.” People who follow the news most of the time were nearly three times more distorted than those who follow it now and then. The authors are careful: “We can’t prove that one causes the other.” Sources on the right and on the left both came with larger gaps. Only the old broadcast networks came with smaller ones.
The effect is older than the internet. In the 1970s George Gerbner argued that heavy television viewers come to see the world as more dangerous than it is. He named it mean world syndrome. Swap danger for the other party and the machine is the same, now tuned for engagement. Steven Pinker would have us judge the world by data, not by anecdotes and images.
One friend and I butt heads over this, though we agree on most other things. He is firmly against Trump and still watches a lot of Fox News. He says he needs to see the world as its viewers see it, so that he can answer them. That is the strongest case for watching, and I take it seriously.
My reply is that this kind of news is not an honest picture of anyone, and the format is wrong for honest discussion. As far as I can tell it mostly leaves him angrier. One experiment points the same way. People paid to follow the other side’s voices on Twitter for a month did not move toward them. The Republicans among them moved further right.
It is the main reason I gave up most of the news I used to follow, CNN and Fox News among them. The study does not tell anyone what to watch. Cutting back was my own call.