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Book Review: Heather Hendershot What’s Fair on the Air? Cold War Right-Wing Broadcasting and the Public Interest

The most significant contributions come in the latter part of the book, where the authors work through the implications of micro-level audience choices – to select one kind of content over another, to add a new voice into the news environment – for the broader political system. Particularly useful is a clarification of the debate over audience fragmentation and polarization. The authors point out that the existing literature in this area is itself fragmented by a muddle of overlapping definitions. In response, Tewksbury and Rittenberg offer a typology of fragmentation in three types. The first type is the fragmentation of audiences for news, smaller audiences across more widely distributed channels. Second, we can consider fragmentation of political knowledge, asking whether issue publics know more about the topics that concern them or whether partisans know more about information they agree with than what they don’t. The third type is fragmentation of the public agenda, a decline in a shared sense of what issues matter to us all. These three forms may be causally related, and are often discussed in the literature as each a natural consequence of the previous: selective exposure leads to knowledge silos and away from shared views of important issues. What Tewksbury and Rittenberg show, however, is that when we view fragmentation as a process and separate that process into its constituent parts, there is more evidence for some links in the chain than others. While many news consumers may show signs of preferring some topics of news content over others, the authors argue we have as yet little evidence for the impact of this specialization on knowledge or the broader agenda. Fragmentation and polarization are both possible results from the trend toward online news consumption rather than the inevitable outcome of life in a high-choice media environment. This is not a book that can offer definitive answers to all our burning questions about online news – the answers, Tewksbury and Rittenberg remind us, simply aren’t yet known. Instead, it organizes what we do know and frames our missing knowledge to help focus in on what needs to be done to fill in the gaps. A wonderful feature of the book is that the authors are clearly energized by the uncertainties they uncover. Their view of inconclusive findings and open questions as exciting challenges to scholars will undoubtedly inspire many readers, particularly students. As the authors note early on, ‘many research questions are still unanswered. That is what makes research fun’ (p. 10). 2012