I was listening to NPR Radio this morning, but couldn’t find the audio on NPR’s site. They were discussing how the masses were choosing to receive their daily news based on their political ideology, and finding a comfort level in hearing broadcasters who reflected their viewpoints. According to the NPR reporter, this trend is affecting politics by inciting politicians towards more extreme, egregious messaging in order to engage their constituency. For example, an anti-immigration congressman may say something impractical, like building a wall along the Mexican border to metaphorically engage with a constituency affected by illegal alien labor.

Most people can see this political divide in the mass media as Fox vs. MSNBC, WSJ vs. NYT. The social media only makes these ideological media walls more compartmentalized because any viewpoint now has a voice. One can now consume media from chosen sources that only fit the way they think and view the world.

Then, friend Joe Pryor alerted me to a NYT article that first acknowledges the worrisome trend that people are starting to “live in partisan ghettoes, ignorant about the other side”. It analyzes a study by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business that measured ideological segregation on the Internet, and the conclusions are revealing:

The methodology is complicated, but can be summarized through a geographic metaphor. Think of the Fox News site as Casper, Wyo. If you visited and shook hands with the people reading the site, you’d be very likely to be shaking hands with a conservative. The New York Times site, they suggest, is like Manhattan. If you shook hands with other readers, you’d probably be shaking hands with liberals.

The study measures the people who visit sites, not the content inside.

According to the study, a person who visited only Fox News would have more overlap with conservatives than 99 percent of Internet news users. A person who only went to The Times’s site would have more liberal overlap than 95 percent of users.

But the core finding is that most Internet users do not stay within their communities. Most people spend a lot of time on a few giant sites with politically integrated audiences, like Yahoo News.

But even when they leave these integrated sites, they often go into areas where most visitors are not like themselves. People who spend a lot of time on Glenn Beck’s Web site are more likely to visit The New York Times’s Web site than average Internet users. People who spend time on the most liberal sites are more likely to go to foxnews.com than average Internet users.

In fact, I always liked the idea that Joe, who I could assume was Oklahoma conservative, was always sending me New York Times articles. And I in fact, enjoy watching Fox News just to see them punch holes in our local congresswoman Nancy Pelosi; you learn a lot. The conclusion is if the world is becoming more secularized, it’s not the internet to blame.

Tonight on CNN, David Gergen mentions that public perception turned against the Big Three auto bailout when “bloggers” feasted on the Big Three’s executives arriving to the November 19 Senate hearings in corporate jets (“going to the soup kitchen in tuxedoes“). Now they’re driving their hybrids to tomorrow’s hearings, but the gesture smacks of an insincere attempt at appeasement.

I like the way Gergen, who used to be Clinton’s press secretary, addresses “bloggers” as a unique media group, and how he gives them credit for influencing and setting the political tone around this tragic debate.

The press is illuminating the fact that there is a profitable car industry in America, it’s just not in Michigan (read the article). CNN claims tonight that the Senate doesn’t have the votes for passing the auto bailout. So the final option may be just to move the car industry south:

There’s no natural law that America must have a Detroit automotive industry, any more than steel had to be made for all time in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania or textiles in New England. Britain sold off all its car plants to foreigners and was no less an advanced economy as a result, though it was a healthier one. Detroit may yet adjust to avoid destruction in the best spirit of American capitalism. The other American car industry is a model for how to do it.

The most popular A-list blogs become go-to sources by posting breaking news first before anybody else. Wired has chronicled how cut-throat the competition is. Now, “everybody media” is out there trying to get breaking news up on YouTube and on their blogs.

Tonight’s SNL appearance of Sarah Palin has all the trappings of being a historic media event combining politics and laughs. The East Coast has the advantage as YouTube devotees set up their vidcams in front of their TVs at 11:30EDT for “taping” and subsequent posting on YouTube. The winners are rewarded with lots of traffic to their YouTube site.

This simple news-gathering linkbaiting strategy will snowball into a massive social media trend – “everybody media” – where individuals seek to become go-to news sources.

I’m hoping that SNL plays it straight up and provides Palin with a script that has her do Weekend Update impersonating Tina Fey’s role.

UPDATE 10/18/08 9:30pm PDT: Huffington Post posts Sarah Palin on SNL, who is getting uniformly poor reviews on Election.Twitter.com. What a wasted opportunity for both NBC and Palin… just see how Obama and McCain shine as comedians in their own right in the previous article Obama and McCain do Stand-Up.

One Presidential debate should be hosted on Comedy Central and start off with comedic monologues. Humor puts some of the peripheral issues like comparing McCain to Bush in context much better than just trying to explain it seriously. John McCain turns out to be an excellent non-angry and gracious comedian, revealing a sympathetic character that he hasn’t shown during his campaign.

YouTube got it up within a few hours of the Al Smith Foundation dinner:

Update 10/16/08 11:30pm PDT: Steven Weber at Huffington Post agrees with me that this funny John McCain is the way he should have run his candidacy. Fire his handlers! Al Gore had the same “serious” problem in 2000, and we found out he was funny too.

The verticalization of Twitter continues, as it should. Twitter can be too broad population to effectively filter out vertical conversations.

Micro-blogging is the best medium at this time to aggregate user generated conversations along topics. Election.Twitter is a simple application but provides a hyper-real time view on the mood of the political nation. The mainstream media will understand this utility soon, and court prominent Twitterers by topic.

Yesterday, decidedly liberal Daily Kos posted an article speculating a Thomas Eagleton-like bombshell about Sarah Palin covering up the fact that her Down’s Syndrome son Trig is possibly her grandson, and that Trig was birthed by Sarah Palin’s daughter who was 16 at the time. Although the shocking claim is tabloidish, the fact is the speculation is now out there (the article received over 1,600 comments over a 24-hour span, many of which leaning towards credibility) and eventually will have to be addressed by the McCain campaign… perhaps even during their convention.

More interesting is the mainstream media (even the well followed liberal HuffPost) has not touched the story in 24-hours, preferring the cautious vetting process that was used with John Edwards / Rielle Hunter earlier this month. The shoot-from-the-hip versus caution-by-fear-of-libel-lawsuit is a profound difference between the social media and mainstream media. It makes me wonder why the mainstream media CNN, NBC, etc. don’t set up subsidiary channels/social networks that can address the fact these tabloidish speculations exist. With social media / social news on the uptick, these kind of stories will surface and be vetted socially for their credibility and value.

The first place I thought most appropriate to initiate the discussion on this topic is Social Median, a new application devoted to vetting news socially.