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Squilliam on 19 February 2012
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Kasz216 said:
Squilliam said:

What proportion of self identified conservatives are actually conservative and vice versa? People usually say one thing and mean another, and the actual meaning of the words 'conservative' and 'liberal' mean different things to different people and that meaning has changed over time. The best thing you could take from this is that binary thinking is in itself extremely stupid. By the standards of most other countries the U.S. media is actually extremely conservative if you take the OECD as a baseline.


A) Pretty much all of them.  Self identification in confidential polls is considered very accurate.  Outside which, it's kinda irrelevent since you've got the two populations going through the exact same questions.

B)  The US media is actually not extremely conservative if you take the OCED as a baseline.  People look at the lack of universal healthcare and like to say the US is more conservative then other developed nations, yet constantly ignore things like race relations, sex relations, freedom of speech, freedom of privacy for any issue you could put America on the right of, i could name another that the US puts on the left.

Furthermore, even if the US media was more conservative, that would be extremely irrelevent, since you know.... the US Mediare reports to the US population, and therefore should be compaired to the US population.

A.) Self identification is accurate? The only thing accurate about polls is you get roughly the same answer whether you ask 10,000 people or 10,000,000 people. The only accurate way to poll is to first define what 'conservative' 'liberal' etc are and then ask a bunch of questions and score them. Then you'll have accuracy but only specific to the definitions and weightings used.

B.) It always depends on what you compare. In rough terms the U.S. is equivalent to the rest of the developed world in terms of race relations, sex relations, freedom of speech etc. The very idea of binary thinking such as conservative vs liberal is extremely backwards regardless of how you wish to define them because they can mean very contradictory things.

You cannot say the media is more liberal than the rest of society or vice versa because you cannot actually find an adequate catch all for what a conservative actually means without the term contradicting the reality of the people who self identify as such. How exactly do you mesh the 'conservative' who swears like a sailor, doesn't want government intervention or regulation to impinge on their rights, takes government subsidies anyway for farming and looks forward to the social security check at the end of the month with the guy whom goes to church every sunday, wants strict control over abortion and swearing on TV and wants more control over how people dress because these young people today have no decency?



Tease.