Abstract
A Nation Fragmented: The Public Agenda in the Information Age is an investigation into the ways the U.S. public agenda fractured in the roughly forty-year period at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, and the part the media played in that process. It is a thoughtful and meticulous text, authored by Jill A. Edy, associate professor of Communication at the University of Oklahoma, and Patrick C. Meirick, associate professor of Communication and director of the Political Communication Center at the University of Oklahoma.
Often mistakenly used interchangeably with the concept of polarization, public agenda fragmentation is the “disagreement about how to prioritize [public] problems or about whether a problem even exists.” (Polarization refers to diverging opinions on a particular issue.) And as the authors clearly show using data collected by the Gallup measure of public agenda, the phenomenon is on the rise. Despite a number of warranted caveats, Figure 3.5, which shows that eight of the 10 highest measures of issue diversity (i.e., the spread of concern over a range of topics) between 1975 and 2014 appear in the latter ten years, may be the most striking example of this shift.
Having established this point, the authors turn their focus to what might account for this fragmentation. As one avenue to answer this query, Chapters 4 and 5 examine the link between two traditional television news sources, respectively, and the splintering of the public agenda. In the first instance, the authors find that broadcast news content has contributed to diversity in the public agenda by reducing public agreement on the importance of any one central issue. By increasing its coverage on defense, crime, and health over the relevant forty-year period, broadcast network news has also effectively shifted toward news content with a positive effect on fragmentation. Chapter 5 complicates this analysis by concluding that “[c]able news is less, not more, diverse in its issue agenda than broadcast news.” Rather, Edy and Meirick determine that cable news channels, generally, show an interest in similar issues—though the positions taken on such topics certainly vary broadly.
These two chapters are necessary and well-formed, yet it’s possible that more attention to social media characterized by increasing rates of news consumption may have been warranted alongside the assessment of traditional news sources. The inclusion of Facebook’s potential effects on the public agenda in Chapter 5 is a good start; however, it may have been useful to also include YouTube, for instance, which 10% of Americans used as a news source in 2013 (the final year included in A Nation Fragmented’s analysis in 2014) and 21% in 2018.
The book pivots in Chapter 6 to examine the role of public attention in the fragmentation of the public agenda, finding that only in moments of great crisis (e.g., the 2007 recession) does the breadth of public concerns become more focused. In Chapter 7, the democratic implications of this breakdown come closest to the fore. How can appropriate solutions be developed without public solidarity about what issues are worthy of discussion in the first place? And in what ways might this fragmentation benefit political leaders? This section responds to the latter question, finding, among other worrying conclusions, that the greater the number of issues that top the public agenda, the greater the capacity for politicians to pick and choose which of those they would like to address—if any. As the authors write, political leaders “can craft a political agenda that avoids issues threatening to their power by ignoring rather than by setting the public agenda.”
In other words, the relationship between a democratically elected government and the people is weakened when the public agenda is splintered. Certainly, a range of issues is important, but beyond a certain threshold divisions and distractions make for a chaotic and fractured public rather than one united by a cause or set of causes. This account is persuasive certainly, but perhaps more room might have been made for a discussion of what agency “we the people” have to move toward a unified public. How can the problem so eloquently laid out by the authors be solved, or at least mitigated?
In the book’s final and shortest chapter, Edy and Meirick conclude their assessment with the question: “What happened to us?” Drawing on evidence and analysis presented throughout the volume, they provide an account of the situation as one in which the public agenda has largely been “driven apart” by a range of forces, including “[n]ews media cues [that] present the public with a wider array of public problems.” It’s a compelling conclusion and nicely draws together the breadth (both historically and theoretically) of the preceding chapters.
With extensive empirical insights and an effective interrogation of both classic and contemporary communication theories, this book is well-suited for scholars, students, journalists, and members of the public interested in how and why the American people have become increasingly concerned with a greater number of issues at once.