In their commentary on my recent book, for In Your Face Politics: Consequences of Uncivil Media, Mattes and Redlawsk make some important points about what the book does and does not address. In particular, they are concerned about the neglect of social media as a source of incivility in American political discourse. This criticism is deserved because I do not provide any original research on this topic. Instead I merely speculate as to its likely effects based on others’ work, and the theory presented in the book.
As a data-oriented scholar, I am always reluctant to make claims about communication effects that I have not studied, and Twitter is definitely one of them. However, consistent with Mattes and Redlawsk, I note that high-arousal messages are more likely to be retransmitted, and Twitter messages that are rebroadcast on television will undoubtedly reach far more people than any single Twitter account. Whether we call this an effect of Twitter or an effect of television is debatable. But I suspect that indirect exposure via other media is central to any impact it might have. As Mattes and Redlawsk note, “Reporters and politicians are on Twitter even if the average voter is not.”
In my experimental studies, however, I find that the mode of message exposure matters as well as the civility of the content. If one holds the political content of a message constant, and varies only whether it is experienced in print, via voice, or by means of an audio-visual medium, incivility is simply not experienced the same way. The audio-visual experience more closely replicates real life, and thus produces not only stronger perceptions of incivility, but also larger reactions in terms of disdain for the opposition and politicians more generally. Listening to the same message with voice-only has a more subdued effect than audio-visual, and when experienced through print, the same political message is not even recognized as uncivil. Because tweets generally involve text (although they can certainly point people toward an online video), my assumption was that, all else being equal, uncivil messages are more likely to be retweeted than civil ones. However, I remain convinced that these messages’ impact is still less than it would be if the same message were shown in audio-visual form.
Mattes and Redlawsk note that “in this election cycle, these tweets have been considered so important to cable news networks that they have felt compelled to cover them.” I would argue instead that tweets have become so uncivil and outrageous that competitive cable news networks have felt compelled to cover them in order to compete in attracting viewers. Highly uncivil tweets are attention-grabbing, to be sure, but I would not call their content particularly “important” by traditional journalistic standards.
In-your-face politics promotes antigovernment attitudes. But these are not the same as anti-candidate attitudes. In fact, I found that when the candidate one likes best is uncivil, the bad behavior is more likely to be viewed as righteous indignation and simply “telling it like it is.” Conservatives are especially reactive to incivility, meaning that their negative regard for government and politicians is exacerbated by in-your face-politics. Conservatives already have more of an anti-government bent, and incivility makes them think even less of government, which became a key component of Donald Trump’s appeal.
But incivility causes their views of the opposition to become increasing negative, and their views of politicians in general increasing contemptuous. “Crooked Hillary!” and “Lock her up!” are hardly statements that show respect for the opposition, which is one of the greatest negative impacts of incivility. It should come as no surprise that the candidate billing himself as “anti-establishment” is popular in this era of incivility.
It is in this sense that I stick to my original claim that if the exact same political message were to appear in print versus spoken on video, the video version would affect people more. One need only think about how people responded to the lewd Donald Trump/Billy Bush video to recognize this difference. It was not as if complaints about Trump’s behavior had not circulated in print before. But viewing something firsthand from the candidate’s mouth is more compelling.
After publishing a surprisingly controversial piece on Harry Potter reading and political preferences earlier this year, I experienced this myself. I was shocked to receive hundreds of hate e-mails, but I also received a few voicemail messages about it on my cell phone. I was both surprised and intrigued by how much more the voice messages bothered me relative to the nasty e-mails. Of course, neither felt great to receive. But hearing a live voice expound upon my wickedness and how I should be banned from contact with all college students somehow made the vitriol seem far angrier and closer to home.
In sum, incivility in the manner of disagreement is separable from the content of a political message. Content can be extreme in extent of disagreement, yet still be expressed civilly and vice-versa. What Americans call polarization these days is really the incivility they experience in political discourse, more than the ideological distance between candidates. Notably, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were perceived to be more ideologically similar by the American public than their predecessors in 2012. Nonetheless, perceptions of polarization increased to even higher levels in 2016.
