The Business of Culture War - Research Paper

 This discussion addresses the link between changes in the media landscape and the rise of contemporary political conflict, framed by the concept of maximizing audience size versus maximizing vote share.

1. Media Content and Delivery Changes

The sources establish that the contemporary American "culture war" is linked to the disruption of the "network era" of news by cable television technology and deregulation in the 1980s.

• The Network Era (1950s–1980s): This period was dominated by three heavily regulated broadcast television outlets whose news divisions often operated as loss leaders. These networks competed for a relatively captive audience with few alternative entertainment or news options. Historically, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requirements often drove broadcasters to support "hard" economic coverage over "soft" cultural coverage, prioritizing reputational and prestige concerns.
• The Cable Disruption: Cable television emerged, introducing a vast variety of alternative entertainment programming. This facilitated the entry of 24-hour national networks (such as Fox News and MSNBC, founded in 1996) whose business model was focused entirely on news and maximizing audience size. This new environment resulted in a sharp increase in TV coverage of cultural topics.
• Content Change: Cable news emphasizes cultural-war issues much more and economic issues much less compared to older broadcast news or politicians. Broadcast news outlets historically had roughly balanced cultural and economic coverage, but since 2010, they have significantly increased their cultural emphasis, converging with cable news.

2. Business Strategy: Mobilization vs. Poaching

Cable news outlets adopted a distinctive business strategy centered on maximizing audience size. They prioritize content based on how effectively it draws in viewers:

• Mobilization: Cultural content is highly effective at attracting viewers who would otherwise watch non-news entertainment ("mobilization"). The number of viewers mobilized by culture is estimated to be greater than the number poached by economics.
• Poaching: Economic content is more effective at attracting viewers from competing news outlets ("poaching").
• Net Viewership: Because the mobilization effect of cultural content outweighs the poaching advantage of economic content, emphasizing cultural issues raises the cable networks’ net viewership, aligning with their size-maximization goal. Indeed, every high-level cultural topic generates more viewership than any of the high-level economic topics in the schema.

3. Politicians' Incentives

Politicians face a parallel tradeoff between mobilization and poaching but have fundamentally different incentives due to their goal of maximizing vote share.

• Incentive Mismatch: A politician maximizes vote share and therefore values poaching an opponent’s voter twice as much as mobilizing a nonvoter.
• Disadvantaged Strategy: This valuation difference means that mobilization-focused strategies—the focus of cable news—are structurally disadvantaged for politicians.
• Content Preference: Consequently, the vast majority of political advertising centers on economic issues (like healthcare, taxes, and jobs), with only a small fraction dedicated to culture-war topics. Relative economic messaging is associated with a higher probability of winning elections, and economics appears relatively better for poaching voters for politicians.

4. Political Spillovers

The business strategy of cable news, emphasizing cultural content for mobilization, generates downstream political effects:

• Voter Priorities: Constituencies that are quasi-exogenously more exposed to cable news consumption tend to assign greater importance to cultural issues relative to economic issues, as measured by voters identifying cultural issues as the "most important problem facing the country".
• Political Rhetoric: Politicians in these highly exposed constituencies respond to the shift in constituent preferences by increasing the cultural emphasis of their campaign advertisements.
• Quantification: The analysis suggests that the rise of cable news accounts for approximately one-third (34% to 41%) of the time-series increase in cultural conflict since 2000.

5. Content Classification

To compare the output of news and politicians accurately, the sources developed a robust content classification system:

• Schema and Data: The content of both news segments (from 1968) and political advertisements (from 1960) was classified using a unified hierarchical schema of 88 granular topics. This was achieved by fine-tuning a large language model.
• High-Level Groupings: Topics are assigned to three high-level labels: Economic, Cultural, or Other.
  • Economic topics include economic policy/conditions, healthcare, taxes, jobs, and education.
  • Cultural topics include race, gender, social issues, crime, safety, immigration, religion, and guns.
• Validation: This division is based on foundational frameworks distinguishing issues concerning "the distribution of material goods" (economic) from those concerning "the reinforcement of behavioral norms" (cultural). A formal data-driven validation confirms that the partition of topics that captures the most cross-topic variation across the six core empirical exercises (e.g., performance and emphasis) lines up almost exactly with the established economic versus cultural labels.

The sources provide detailed context on both the international uniqueness of the US culture war and the historical role of "size-maximizing actors" that parallel the incentives of modern cable news.

International Perspective on Cultural Polarization

The US is identified as an outlier in the depth and type of its cultural conflict compared to other Western liberal democracies.

• Deeper and Earlier Divisions: Although most liberal democracies have experienced educational polarization patterns, cultural divisions in the US emerged earlier and appear much deeper.
• Unique Scope: The US culture war is broader than those typically seen elsewhere; disputes over issues like guns, abortion, policing, religion, and gay rights are mostly unique to the US. Culture wars in other democracies are largely dominated by immigration.
• Outlier Status: The US is an outlier in several related metrics, including affective and partisan polarization, populist cultural values, urban-rural voting divides, and the partisan gap in trust in news media. Disputes over US-unique cultural issues that erupt in other countries often appear to be directly exported from the US.
• The Role of News: The earlier and sharper rise of cultural conflict in the US is attributed, in part, to the outsized role of partisan TV news. Trends in affective polarization are positively correlated with the growth in the number of private 24-hour news channels in a country.

Domestic Historical Perspective: Size-Maximizing Actors

The current cable news dynamic (maximizing audience size over vote share) fits a historical pattern where polarization is generally "led" by size-maximizing actors. These actors prioritize mobilizing strategies that diverge from the "poaching-focused messaging" of share-maximizing politicians.

• 1960s Activism: Polarization in the 1960s was initially driven by size-maximizing activist groups who raised the salience of polarizing social issues such as civil rights, feminism, and the Vietnam War. These initial fault lines cross-cut partisan divisions (e.g., segregationist Democrats and racially liberal Republicans). The ultimate alignment of these cultural divisions with partisan ones came later, as the Democratic Party incorporated socially progressive movements and the Republican Party embraced anti-counterculture backlash and "law and order" messaging.
• Rise of the Right-Wing Media (1970s–1990s): A subsequent wave of cultural polarization grew on the right, beginning with televangelists and Religious Right movement leaders in the 1970s and 1980s. This was followed by partisan talk radio shows (unleashed by the 1987 abolition of the Fairness Doctrine) and eventually Fox News.
• Pundit Influence: Many key planks of "Trumpism" were first popularized by right-wing media personalities in the 1990s, such as the radio personality Rush Limbaugh and TV commentator Pat Buchanan.

This perspective suggests that size-maximizing media outlets (like cable news) and other social actors (like activists or pundits) drive issue realignment by changing voter preferences, forcing share-maximizing politicians to eventually pivot their campaign strategy to align with the new salient cultural cleavages.

The detailed viewership data, derived from household-by-second smart TV data, confirms that the distinctive business strategy of cable news is rooted in content's differing effects on audience mobilization versus poaching.

The analysis explicitly tracks households as they switch on, off, and between channels to decompose the flow of viewers when content shifts from cultural to economic issues:

1. The Differential Performance of Content

Overall, the data shows that economic topics underperform cultural topics on cable news. Switching from an entirely cultural segment (e.g., crime, race, gender) to an entirely economic segment (e.g., taxes, healthcare, jobs) results in a contemporaneous decrease in viewership of 2.2%. Every high-level cultural topic in the schema generates more viewership than any of the high-level economic topics.

2. Decomposing Flows: Poaching vs. Mobilization

The core difference lies in where the viewers go when they tune out, which determines whether the content excels at poaching (attracting viewers from competitors) or mobilization (attracting viewers from the outside option of non-news entertainment).

• Poaching Advantage (Economic Content): Economic coverage is better at poaching viewers from competing news outlets. When content shifts from cultural to economic, there is a decrease in flows to competitor channels (i.e., a gain in poaching).
• Mobilization Disadvantage (Economic Content): Economic coverage is much worse at mobilizing viewers who would otherwise not watch news. When content shifts from cultural to economic, there is a substantial increase in flows to the outside option (non-news channels or turning off the TV), resulting in a loss of mobilization. Households tune out of a network significantly more quickly when it is airing economic, rather than cultural, content.

3. Net Business Incentive

For cable news outlets aiming to maximize audience size (valuing poaching and mobilization equally), the mobilization effect of cultural content is stronger than the poaching effect of economic content. Therefore, cultural coverage increases the cable networks’ net viewership on balance. This structure aligns the business strategy of size-maximizing cable news with the heavy emphasis on cultural conflict.