Here we go again: some professors at Tufts University in Massaschusetts have claimed, post-Tucson, that by their "objective research," conservatives use nastier rhetoric than liberals. From the press release:
While the tragic shooting in Arizona has spotlighted the vitriol that seems to pervade political commentary, objective research examining the scope of this disturbing phenomenon has been lacking.
In the first published study of its kind, social scientists at Tufts University's School of Arts and Sciences have found that outrage talk is endemic among commentators of all political stripes, but measurably worse on the political right, and is more prevalent than it was even during the turmoil of the war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal.
In their study, Tufts Assistant Professor of Sociology Sarah Sobieraj and Professor of Political Science Jeffrey Berry systematically scrutinized what they call "outrage talk" in leading talk radio, cable news analysis, political blogs and newspaper columns. Their findings, "From Incivility to Outrage: Political Discourse in Blogs, Talk Radio, and Cable News," appears in the February 2011 issue of the journal Political Communication, available online February 8.
The term "outrage talk" refers to a form of political discourse involving efforts to provoke visceral responses, such as anger, righteousness, fear or moral indignation, through the use of overgeneralizations, sensationalism, misleading or patently inaccurate information, ad hominem attacks and partial truths about opponents.
"Objective" research may crumble pretty quickly if professors start identifying as "patently inaccurate" and "ad hominem attacks" concepts such as "Obama is a socialist." Then, you can imagine the idea that liberals don't use as much outrage talk because it's accurate to state "the Iraq War was a failure."
During a 10-week period in the spring of 2009, four researchers reviewed evening cable TV, national radio talk shows, ideological political blogs and mainstream newspaper columns for 13 variables, such as insulting language, name calling and misrepresentative exaggeration. Researchers also judged overall tone of each sample and proportion of outrage language.
Almost 9 out of 10 cases sampled, or 89.6 percent, contained at least one outrage incident. One hundred percent of TV episodes and 98.8 percent of talk radio programs contained outrage incidents, while 82.8 percent of blog posts incorporated outrage writing. In some cases, outrage speech or behavior occurred at a rate of more than one instance per minute.
When it comes to inflammatory language, is one side really worse than the other? Yes, found the Tufts researchers: "Our data indicate that the right uses decidedly more outrage speech than the left. Taken as a whole, liberal content is quite nasty in character, following the outrage model of emotional, dramatic and judgment-laden speech. Conservatives, however, are even nastier."
The data showed the political right engaging in an average of 15.57 outrage acts per case, while the left engaged in 10.32 acts per case.
The press release doesn't really get specific. It would be more credible if it were more specific in defining what their examples of "misrepresentative exaggeration" are.
