A very interesting chart created yesterday by the folks at Gawker. They put data collected by Nielson in January 2008 about the self-described political leanings of visitors to various websites in graph form. See above. There are a number of ways this presentation can be criticized (have at it) but it is thought-provoking.
Comments on the Gawker site lament the fact that MTV, TMZ, and CollegHumor.com seem to have a lock on the political moderates in this country.
Please share widely!
Despite the fact that recent data suggest the country is growing more liberal, it looks like there are more conservative web-surfers out there than liberal web-surfers. You know what this tells me?
<
p>Conservatives are lazy, web-surfing procrastinators! Get back to work you lazy conservatives!
… the red bars include everything other than those who self-identify as liberal or very liberal.
<
p>If they simply omitted the red bars (which provide no new information, anyway), it’d be less open to misinterpretation.
With the grouping of “moderate” in with the conservatives you lose a lot of information. Not sure why they couldn’t have used three colors…
I found the chart very hard to believe until I followed the link and saw that detail.
This chart only measures those who “self-describe” themselves as liberals, not those who actually hold liberal beliefs. If the latter is measured, the numbers would be higher across the board. Polls in studies have shown that a majority of Americans believe in a “liberal” agenda, including national health insurance, doing “whatever it takes” to protect the environment, and setting a timetable to withdraw for Iraq, yet don’t label themselves “liberals”. Most “liberal” values are in fact moderate values, if “moderate” means the public shares that value as well.
<
p>Also, some “liberals” simply prefer the term “progressive” take the distinction between the two seriously.
… the reporting data they used to put this together presumes undeclared are automatically Conservative. A skewed perception IMHO.
Well, if you read their text, they don’t presume undeclared are conservative, because they did measure the difference in their survey. But it is extremely deceptive the way the graph colors conservatives, moderates, and undeclared all in red. They should have at least used a separate color for moderate/undeclared.
The idea that websites like MTV and CollegeHumor “have a lock” on the political moderates in this country is not supported by this graph. Nevermind the fact that “red” includes all non-liberal identifiers. What this graph shows is that websites like MTV and TMZ get nearly equal number of views by liberals and non-liberals, which makes sense considering those sites are non-political (apparently all ideologies like celebrity gossip!). This assertion would only be correct if this data reflected the degree of liberalism of the visitors to each site, which is not the case.
PS One mistake, the sites in the middle do not get “equal” shares of red and blue, but they are in the relative middle for this graph…