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Republicans and Democrats offer starkly different assessments of the impact of several of the nation’s leading institutions – including the news media, colleges and universities and churches and religious organizations – and in some cases, the gap in these views is significantly wider today than it was just a year ago.
While a majority of the public (55%) continues to say that colleges and universities have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country these days, Republicans express increasingly negative views.
A majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (58%) now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country, up from 45% last year. By contrast, most Democrats and Democratic leaners (72%) say colleges and universities have a positive effect, which is little changed from recent years.
The national survey by Pew Research Center, conducted June 8-18 among 2,504 adults, finds that partisan differences in views of the national news media, already wide, have grown even wider. Democrats’ views of the effect of the national news media have grown more positive over the past year, while Republicans remain overwhelmingly negative.
About as many Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents think the news media has a positive (44%) as negative (46%) impact on the way things are going in the country. The share of Democrats holding a positive view of the news media’s impact has increased 11 percentage points since last August (33%).
Republicans, by about eight-to-one (85% to 10%), say the news media has a negative effect. These views have changed little in the past few years.
Read more:
http://www.people-press.org/2017/07/10/sharp-partisan-divisions-in-views-of-national-institutions/(image included for Trump cultists)
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I know people like to think I just started criticizing the Republican party in 2015, but after the 2012 election I agreed with Bobby Jindal when he called for the Republicans to stop being the "party of stupid". Turn on Fox News or listen to talk radio and the level of false equivalence, deflection, and simple-minded thinking is astonishing. I'm not just blaming conservative media either, the television media in general(even my beloved CNN) is incredibly superficial and unsophisticated. Let's face it though, the media does what appeals to the most people, and a long-form discussion of complex issues isn't good for ratings.
Conservative media has grabbed hold of this narrative that colleges/universities are brainwashing stations where most students are SJW snowflakes, and a lot of Republican voters believe them. Watching a Republican primary debate isn't much different from an SNL skit, where the debate topics are do vaccines cause autism, are humans contributing to climate change, how many federal departments would you eliminate, is tithing a model for taxation, is evolution true, etc. Years ago the snobby liberals were my main target on this forum, now I find myself agreeing with them more and more.
Thoughts, PaRDians?