Television can cause populism

These days, the world is so politically confused that it is easy to think that politics is also the reason they make it. What if they're much simpler? What if, for example, one of the reasons for the wave of populism in recent years: Trump, Brex, the climb of the extreme right in Europe is the fact that voters have seen so much television “It's disgusting to even think about it, since it's playing Metropolitan prejudice, under which the other half is always dumber.

But a rigorous study of numbers makes it harder to reject the idea. The authors have studied the spread of the Mediace canals in Italy, and have found that people who have seen more cartoons, soap operas, and quizes from childhood have 10 percent more chances of voting for populist parties because of their small cognitive abilities are more likely to trust politicians offering simplistic them.

The study, published in American Economic Revive, is also impressive for the theories it rejects. It's easy to think that, given that the Medians belong to Silvio Berlusconi whose son is today the general director of his programs are used to do right-hand propaganda. But in his study period, there were very little information programs on his networks, and however, the <x0-effective Mediaset” has worked even in favour of his rival movement on the left arm, “5. The stars” of Beppe Grillos: it was populism, not the blusconism that was stimulated.

A Case of Chances

Do you think that among those who have attended the Medias and the populist parties there is no connection? The gradual spread of the television signal during the eighty years led to a “natural experiment” that excludes this possibility. Young people in areas where it was harder to get the Mediaset signal have been less affected. The result of this was that people who spent more time watching the programmes ended up having less cognitive and less civic capacity, except they got worse results in math evidence and the understanding of a text.

However, it is important to understand that this type “of pressure” does not happen because bad television fool people. It's a matter of possibilities: every hour you spend watching a worthless cartoon, it's an hour that you steal from reading, exploring the physical world, or watching an educational program. The same goes for video games, social networking, and so on. There is no say in being “calculated to be harmful, just to prevent us from doing something better.

This reminds me of media theorist Neil Postman, who said that our future accurately predicted George Orwell's “The new World” of Aldous Husley, more than George Orwell's “148x3>: what would destroy us would be our dependence on useless pleasures, more than state expectations.

But this recent study shows that they were both right, since seemingly useless pleasures contribute to making us the kind of people who favor authoritarian leaders. It also reminds us that we should not rule out certain explanations, about political and social phenomena, just because they sound like snobs. The fact that a theory confirms what we already think does not make him right, nor necessarily wrong.

The Guardian World.al