Why Republicans Don’t Believe In Evolution Anymore
BY ZACK BEAUCHAMP ON DECEMBER 31, 2013 AT 1:06 PM
The theory of evolution is right up there with the theory of gravity in terms of its universal acceptance among scientists. But, as we’ve learned from the climate change debate, politics has the power to trump science — and, according to a new Pew poll, it seems like political partisanship may be starting to take its toll on evolution. While a comfortable majority of Republicans accepted human evolution as fact in 2009, Pew finds a plurality now reject it — an astonishing 19 point reversal in four years.
It’s a finding that tells us a lot, both principally about the (ahem) evolution of the Republican Party in the past fours. In short, the kind of person who doesn’t believe in evolution is much more likely be a typical Republican today than four years ago — for reasons that have only a bit to do with the debate over evolution itself.
There are two keys to understanding what the Pew poll teaches us about Republicans. First, the drop in belief in evolution is among Republicans and, more or less, Republicans only. Acceptance of human evolution was basically the same among Democrats and independents in 2013 as it was in 2009. Second, the share of the total population that believes in evolution hasn’t changed at all. The drop in Republican belief doesn’t appear to be people changing their minds about evolution so much as people who already didn’t believe in evolution becoming Republicans.
Why might that be? The obvious explanation is the changing character of the Republican base. When Republicans win in recent years, those victories are won on the backs of old voters, white voters, and religious voters. While race isn’t super-important in predicting views on evolution, age and religion are. Each generation of Americans, Pew found, is increasingly more likely to accept natural human evolution; Americans 18-29 do so by a 68-27 margin, while the number for seniors (65+) is 49-36. Likewise, white evangelical protestants are the group most likely to reject evolution, while the religiously unaffiliated are by far the most likely to accept it.
The winnowing of self-identified Republicans to these demographic groups has been dramatic in recent years. The overall number of Americans who identify as Republicans hovered around 29 percent from from 2008-2012 as American seniors became dramatically more Republican, the pro-GOP margin shifting from 35-34 in 2008 to 39-29 in 2012. White evangelicals have become similarly more Republican at the same time.
So on one look, the decline in Republican belief in evolution is perfectly consistent with one of the most fundamental trends in American politics: a greying, born-again Republican Party increasingly out of step with the rest of America’s political views.
The Republican base’s increasing hostility to evolution could very well explain the rash of recent state-level debates on teaching evolution in schools. In the past four years, we’ve seen a slate of state controversies over school textbooks and curricula that teach creationism alongside evolution. States like Texas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and New Mexico have all had versions of this fight — all controversies sparked by conservative state leaders that have heated up in the past two or three years. All of this anti-evolution activity makes much more sense if understood as Republican representatives and activists responding to incentives created by their increasingly homogenous base.
If that explanation is right, then we should expect to see similarly base-tailored legislation coming out of Republican state representatives in 2014 and beyond. The demographic trends concentrating the Republican base don’t appear to be slowing, which means that Republicans will have even stronger incentives over time to push legislation that appeals to the older, whiter, more religious demographic. This means that more issues like creationism in schools that don’t play on the national level, but can help local Republicans make a name for themselves inside the party, might make their way into state capitols in the coming year.
But the demographic explanation isn’t everything. Pew cautions that “differences in the racial and ethnic composition of Democrats and Republicans or differences in their levels of religious commitment do not wholly explain partisan differences in beliefs about evolution.” Put more simply, Republicans are more skeptical of evolution than you would expect even when you take into account the demographic character of its base.
This suggests another, more subtle effect at work. A wealth of research into political psychology shows that people’s partisan affiliations affect their beliefs on basic facts. Republicans are overwhelmingly more likely to think the economy is doing well when Republicans hold the Presidency, and ditto with Democrats when their guy holds the White House. A recent experiment found that even basic math is contaminated by politics; people are much more likely to correctly solve basic math problems when, in context, solving them correctly helps rather than hurts their party.
In the evolution context, this suggests a feedback effect at work among Republicans. As the GOP becomes more associated with the creationist cause as a consequence of demographic shifts, Republicans start to feel more like being skeptical of evolution is their “team” position. So even Republicans who are demographically more likely to accept the basic science of evolution start to reject it, because that belief best harmonizes their beliefs with the perceived interest of their political party. Politics, it seems, really does ruin everything — including science.
Young Viewers Avoid Fox News Like the Plague as Ratings Drop 30%
Fox News’ attempt to stop the flood of young viewers from fleeing the network failed as FNC lost the most young viewers of any cable news network in 2013.
TVNewser reported on the big drop in young people tuning into Fox News, “Compared to 2012, Fox News was down -5% in total viewers and -19% in the A25-54 demographic in total day. In primetime, the network was down -14% in total viewers and -30% in the demo, the steepest decline among younger viewers of all the cable news networks.”
2012 was a presidential election year, so all three cable news networks lost viewers in 2013. The difference is that at Fox News this problem has been going on for years. The move of Megyn Kelly to 9 PM was supposed to attract young viewers, but Kelly suffered a drop 23% in young viewership compared to Sean Hannity’s 2012 ratings. Bill O’Reilly is down 23% with younger viewers, and Hannity is down 16%.
Fox knows that this is a serious problem. It’s the reason why they shook up their primetime schedule. The reality is that Fox News has the oldest audience in all television. The average age of a Fox News viewer is 65 years old. FNC can remain the ratings leader in the short term future as long as the senior set keeps tuning in, but what happens when there aren’t enough young people tuning in to replace the elderly audience?
If Fox News fails to build a future audience, they will go extinct. It would have been unfathomable in early 1990s to suggest that one day CNN would be the least watched cable news network, but that is exactly what has happened. Beneath all of the arrogant swagger and bragging, Fox News has a huge problem.
Christie’s Bridge-Gate Scandal Boosts Rachel Maddow To Ratings Victory Over Fox News
The dominance of Fox News in the Nielsen ratings for cable networks has not been seriously challenged for most of the past several years. There have been periods that looked promising for the competition, particularly the months between the Democratic National Convention and the presidential election in 2012. During that time MSNBC was beating Fox on a regular basis as President Obama was doing the same to Mitt Romney. That trend was still in effect as late as January of 2013 when Fox reported steep declines in the key 25-54 demographic, while MSNBC shot upward.
However, that state of affairs did not hold as the nation settled into a new year with the excitement of electioneering behind them. There would be little drama in the ratings race for the next few months. Eventually, Fox would enjoy a rebound as they ramped up their coverage of various scandals that they had been carefully crafting with their Republican allies. But even then they were suffering losses of the younger viewers that advertisers favor.
Last week, however, saw an unexpected bounce for MSNBC, and particularly Rachel Maddow. Her ratings in the demo thrust her into the number one spot for the whole week, ahead of Fox's newly minted prime time star Megyn Kelly. Chris Matthews also benefited by tying the week with Greta Van Susteren, and Lawrence O'Donnell scored clean victories over Sean Hannity on a couple of days. This turnaround was surprising during a post-holiday lull, but there is a possible reason for it.
Maddow and her colleagues may have Chris Christie to thank for their ratings success. Their rising fortunes began at the same time that Maddow broke the story of the George Washington Bridge tantrum thrown by the Christie camp as political payback to unsupportive Democrats.
Let's face it...Scandals have the same power to drive ratings in political news as they do in soap operas. The last ratings spike that Maddow enjoyed was when a video of Romney appeared showing him casting aside 47% of the American electorate as lazy moochers. And, as mentioned above, Fox exploited their own scandal sheet last may to recover from a long slump.
What this tells us is that, in order for MSNBC to consistently rise above Fox, they need to have as effective a scandal factory as Fox has. That's a tall order because Fox has big head start in manufacturing fake scandals and the phony outrage that accompanies them. And for a network like MSNBC that has yet to exhibit much of an aptitude for inventing controversies that don't exist in reality, they have some catching up to do.
Of course, Republicans have been more than generous in producing scandals for themselves, as the Christie affair so clearly demonstrates. The problem is that the so-called liberal media has not been especially good at taking advantage of the opportunities that were laid in their lap. But if MSNBC or CNN want to seriously challenge Fox's ratings dominance, they had better show some improvement in that area in the future. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/01/13/1269486/-Christie-s-Bridge-Gate-Scandal-Boosts-Rachel-Maddow-To-Ratings-Victory-Over-Fox-News
Sarah Palin Rehired At Fox News To ‘Piss Off’ People And Other Tales Of Temper Tantrums
.. excerpt .. "So Ailes permitted Beck] to continue broadcasting his race-baiting, Nazi-inflected, conspiracy theories for several more months because he would rather poison the airwaves (and the minds of his viewers) with lies and hatred than to let his ideological adversaries think they had scored a victory."
What does Fox News CEO Roger Ailes have in common with New Jersey governor Chris Christie? They are both bullies who enjoy taking out revenge on their political enemies in the most childish way possible. [They are also a couple of jerks whose chunky frames are only outweighed by their inflated egos, and who have a deep and perverse mutual affection .. http://www.newscorpse.com/ncWP/?p=11234 ..for one another] By now everyone knows how Christie sought to punish Democrats in Fort Lee by shutting down lanes on the George Washington Bridge, creating severe traffic jams, costing millions in productivity loss, and potentially endangering people’s lives. And now we learn, from Ailes himself, that his emotional maturity is similarly stunted.
In an interview .. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/roger-ailes-fights-back-cnn-668765?page=2 .. with the Hollywood Reporter this week, Ailes was asked “Why bring back Sarah Palin just a few months after not renewing her contract?” His answer exposes him as a petulant little twerp who may be too senile to continue running a national news network.
---- Ailes: I’m not a defender of everything she says. I don’t hear everything she says. But I know she represents a certain group of people who rose up against their own party, which you rarely see. I probably hired her back, if you really want to get to the bottom of it, to give her a chance to say her piece and piss off the people that wanted her dead. ----
Indeed, Palin represents a certain group of Tea-sodden people, but they are fervently supportive of the far-right wing of their party (as is Ailes) and would never consider voting for anyone but a Republican. The fact that Ailes can’t cite as reasons for Palin’s rehire her superior intellect or insightful analysis says much about his disdain for both Palin and his audience. His management philosophy at Fox appears to include a mandate to inflict revenge on liberals who don’t even watch the network. In reality, the people who dislike Palin (this author included) couldn’t be happier that she is back on Fox News making an ass of herself and the network.
This isn’t the first time that Ailes has made a personnel decision that is rooted in childish vengeance. Last year, in a fawning biography that Ailes himself had solicited, he told the author .. http://www.newscorpse.com/ncWP/?p=9326 .. why he had kept Glenn Beck on the air long after he had decided that Beck was a divisive figure who was costing the network advertising revenue. The reason Ailes gave for putting off Beck’s departure was that he “didn’t want to give MoveOn and Media Matters the satisfaction.” So Ailes permitted Beck] to continue broadcasting his race-baiting, Nazi-inflected, conspiracy theories for several more months because he would rather poison the airwaves (and the minds of his viewers) with lies and hatred than to let his ideological adversaries think they had scored a victory.
Another example of the juvenile (and paranoid) brand of Ailes’ management style was revealed in an article this week in the Daily Beast. David Freedlander wrote in .. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/10/fox-s-war-against-ailes-biographer.html .. “Fox’s War Against Ailes Biographer” about the lengths to which Ailes will go to attack journalists who dare to write anything about the cable news overlord:
---- “Fox News has been waiting for [Gabriel] Sherman’s book [The Loudest Voice In The Room] .. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812992857?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=0812992857&linkCode=xm2&tag=newscorpsecom-20 .. to come out. According to interviews with a half-dozen former employees of what is known as the Fox News ‘Brain Room,’ the brain trust at the network has been following Sherman’s work for years. Although the so-called ‘Brain Room,’ located in the basement of Fox News studios, was supposed to be dedicated to research for the networks programming, two former news librarians describe an environment where they were frequently called to do opposition research about media reporters who were writing about Fox News or Ailes. Former employees described being tasked to investigate reporters from a variety of beats, including hunting down personal information such as voter registration that was used to determine how ‘Fox-friendly’ the reporter was.” ----
The use of a newsroom’s assets and personnel to carry out private vendettas is plainly unethical, as noted by NPR’s media reporter David Folkenflik. Folkenflik was himself a victim .. http://www.newscorpse.com/ncWP/?p=10750 .. of Fox’s wrath and gave the Daily Beast his assessment of the toxic environment at Fox News:
---- “They are on a wartime footing. They approach this stuff in a very different way, in the way that a PR shop in a political campaign would. It is hard to imagine any other serious news outlet — The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN — handling negative news stories in this way.” ----
And that’s pretty much the gist of it. Fox is perpetually at war. It is a theme that permeates their broadcasts whether it’s about a Class War .. http://www.newscorpse.com/ncWP/?p=11202 .. or a War on Christmas .. http://www.newscorpse.com/ncWP/?p=11083 , there is a built in hostility at Fox that infects its personnel on and off the air. It is why they regard anyone who disagrees with their editorial viewpoint as a hostile adversary. And that precise language was used in an ad that Fox placed in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post:
[Update 1/11/2014] In response to Ailes claim that he rehired Palin to piss people off, Palin took to her Facebook page to say “Funny. I accepted for the same reason!” Proving that both Ailes and Palin are too stupid to grasp that her critics aren’t the least bit pissed off by her coming back to Fox and spewing her laughably ignorant drivel.
You should know it by now, tis. Murdoch, and Ailes, through FOX NEWS, feeds you the public lies, misinformation and conspiracy theories. In a jack-booted war-footed manner, which clearly indicates their total disdain for the Zoomerican public, i.e. their viewers.
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