Squilliam said:
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? |
A) Moderate is an option, so it's not really binary. And again this is again, irrelevent we're comparing a subset of a population with the population as a whole.
B) You don't have to "mesh" these things. There are moderates. To Identify as a liberal or a conservative you cleary have to pass more then a 51% marker. So it's really irrelevent. Moderates are there afterall, it's pretty easy to see that on average, many more reporters, then average people have more liberal views or feel stronger about the issues they are liebral on, and hence call themselves liberals.
Almost no reporters consider themselves conservatives. Seems pretty obvious.
Also, no the US isn't roughly equal to the rest of the developed world in terms of race relations, sex relations, freedom of speech etc. The US is pretty far ahead in 2 out of the 3 categories, with it being about the middle sex relations wise.
Economically europe's actually been quite more conservative then the US for a while not, outside a few of the "trouble" states.
The only place Europe is really more leftwing is the social benefits component.
Heck, even overally taxation tends to be more regressive europeon wise.
