We follow three South Carolina voters and profile their media consumption, matching up their habits against national survey data. Watch a video of their activity and take a quiz to see which shows are popular across the board and which appeal to people with specific ideologies. View the video and take the quiz.
“I’ll occasionally look at Fox, but I get so irritated, the way even in their news they make conservative comments,” he says.
But Akers was never so deep in his information bubble as to block out alternative ideas. Although he was a Hillary Clinton delegate at the last Democratic convention, he has been disappointed enough by Obama — “He’s become such a divisive figure” — to have fallen for Jon Huntsman, the Republican who Akers thought would be tough on spending but moderate on social issues.
Now that Huntsman has dropped out, Akers is weighing whether to risk expulsion from the county Democratic hierarchy if he votes in the GOP primary — in South Carolina, all voters may take part in any party’s primary — or stick with his own party.
He has been surprised to find himself interested in Romney as a moderate who might not be that different from Obama and might be more competent. And as his Democratic friends send him links to YouTube videos in which Ron Paul calls for steep cuts in military spending and supports legalizing same-sex marriage, Akers is intrigued.
By Thursday afternoon, he’s wavering between Romney and reluctantly sticking with Obama.
Akers hurries home to his snazzy condo, a fourth floor walk-up in a renovated building that was once a college dorm. He feeds the dogs and checks the latest tweets. He loves how the new world of social media keeps every day feeling urgent and alive, yet he sometimes wonders when he will just stop and breathe.
“The whole breaking news thing is so exciting, the chance to be right on the edge of everything,” he says. “But everything’s subjective, and you kind of have to figure out for yourself who’s right and what’s true. It can be hard.”
‘Christian worldview’
Across the political divide, Belsom, who supported Michele Bachmann before turning to Gingrich, agrees: “I try to avoid a lot of what the media puts out that is biased. But because I am mostly on Facebook and a lot of my friends are pro-Newt, it comes as a shock to me when I turn on the TV at a hotel — we don’t watch TV at home — and I see how pro-Romney the media are.”
Belsom — gracious, willowy and chatty — sometimes worries that she’s not seeing the full picture, yet she wants her family to live firmly in “our Christian worldview. I want my daughter to know that we are under attack by radical Islam, even if she sometimes gets depressed about the whole movement to Sharia law. I home-school her because the government schools have an anti-Christian worldview, so they’re teaching lies.”
Growing up in South Florida, Belsom read three local newspapers, and the family watched the evening news on TV. But as she and her parents grew more religious, they began reading mainly conservative and Christian outlets. The bookcases in Belsom’s home office include shelves of titles on creationism, as well as books warning against pornography, “the gay agenda” and radical Islam.
On Facebook, the big story is Obama deciding against approving an oil pipeline from Canada to Texas. Belsom scans rants against the decision. One headline reads, “Obama cans pipeline, signaling no interest in job creation”.
“I think we can all agree Obama’s driving us into the ground,” she says. “My honest opinion is that he hates our country and is trying to destroy us. Hopefully, I’m not too tunnel-visioned. But I guess I mostly see what I agree with.”
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