How trashy TV made children dumber and ena…

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Democracy Dies in Darkness

Business

How trashy TV made

children dumber and
enabled a wave of populist
leaders

Monitors at RAI television studios in Rome display Silvio

Berlusconi’s message announcing his political debut on
Jan. 26, 1994. (Franco Origlia/Getty Images)
By Andrew Van Dam
July 20 at 7:00 AM

This is a story about how the lowest

common denominator of popular media
paved the way for the lowest common
denominator of populist politics. And it’s
got data.

It begins with the opening of Italy’s

airwaves, long the dominion of the highly
regarded public broadcaster RAI. In the
1980s, an aggressive and unabashedly
unsophisticated channel called Mediaset
elbowed its way into the market and spread
across the country, buying up small local
channels and countering RAI’s educational
mission with a heavy dose of cartoons,
sports, soap operas, movies and other light
entertainment.
By 1990, 49 out of 50 Italians could watch
Mediaset — half of the country had gained
access in just five years. These unusual
events allowed a team of Italian economists
to compare towns that initially had
Mediaset with otherwise equivalent towns
that didn’t get reception until later, and thus
calculate how a few extra years of lowbrow
TV can shape a society’s politics.

Keep Reading
The results are bleak. In the American
Economic Review, Ruben Durante of
Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona,
Paolo Pinotti of Bocconi University in Milan
and Andrea Tesei of Queen Mary University
of London analyze detailed broadcast-
transmitter data to show that more
exposure to Mediaset’s vapid programming
was followed by an enduring boost in
support for populist candidates peddling
simple messages and easy answers.
You may think this relationship has an
obvious explanation, presumably because
you’re aware that Mediaset’s founder and
controlling owner is noted populist
politician and former Italian prime minister
Silvio Berlusconi. But the researchers go to
great lengths to prove this isn’t just a
Berlusconi effect. For starters, the bump
extends to his populist competitors,
particularly the Five Star Movement.
Founded on a comedian’s blog a decade ago,
the anti-establishment movement became
the biggest single party in Italy’s Parliament
after last year’s election.

[The testy marriage at the center of Italy’s

government]
Television’s role in populist success
apparently lies in entertainment, not in
political messaging. During the period when
certain areas had greater Mediaset exposure
than others, neither Mediaset nor
Berlusconi had entered the political fray.
The researchers digitized years of old
newspaper television listings to show that
Mediaset offered almost three times as
many hours of movies and entertainment as
RAI and avoided almost all news and
educational programming.

Benjamin Olken, a professor at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology who
pioneered the broadcast-tower analysis used
by the Italian team, said the research added
to evidence that “TV that’s not explicitly
about politics can have an effect on politics.”
In a 2009 analysis published in the
American Economic Journal: Applied
Economics, Olken analyzed differences in
TV and radio signals in 606 villages on the
Indonesian island of Java to show how
greater access to broadcast media
corresponded with lower civic participation
and lower levels of trust.

In Italy, the economists also used critics’

reviews, as well as ratings from the Motion
Picture Association of America, to show
Mediaset’s programming was of lower
quality and less suitable for a general
audience.
They found that lowbrow television’s
electoral effect came with a bump of almost
10 percentage points between the two
groups that watched it most: those under
age 10 and those 55 and older. As they aged,
the two groups would both come to support
populists, albeit for different reasons.

Young people who watched Mediaset during

their formative years would, Durante said,
grow up to be “less cognitively sophisticated
and less civically minded” than their peers
who only had access to public broadcasting
and local stations during that period.
Durante describes it as a matter of
opportunity cost: Every hour you spend
watching TV is an hour you aren’t reading,
playing outside or socializing with other
kids. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but that may
have long-term effects on what kind of
person you will become.”

On a battery of psychological and cognitive

tests administered to military conscripts,
young men from areas with more Mediaset
exposure were between 8 percent and 25
percent more likely to earn the lowest
scores. On an international test conducted
in 2012, Italian adults from places where
they first would have been exposed to
Mediaset under the age of 10 had math and
reading scores that were significantly worse
than those of their peers. They were also
less civically minded and less politically
active.

It’s not surprising, perhaps, that these men

and women were attracted to Berlusconi
and later the Five Star Movement, both of
whom were more likely to use simple
language in their speeches and platforms,
the researchers show.

Trashy TV’s brain-numbing effects weren’t

as pronounced for Italians exposed to
Mediaset later in life ​ — researchers found
their test scores were similar to their peers.
Instead, their populist leanings were
influenced by the news. By the time
Mediaset offered regular news
programming, in the early 90s, many older
viewers had been hooked on the channel’s
cheap entertainment and were much more
likely to watch news offered by Mediaset
than by other broadcasters.

Coverage at stations tilted toward

Berlusconi in the 1994 election, soon after
scandals felled the conservative government
and inspired the entrepreneur turned
populist demagogue to throw his hat in the
ring. Older TV watchers were glued to the
news and swept up in the campaign.
[Yes, watching Fox does make you more
conservative]

This result echoes a 2017 analysis in the

same academic journal by a separate team
that used variation in channel listings to
calculate that Fox News gave Republicans a
half-point boost in 2000, building up to a
six-percentage-point advantage in 2008
compared with a baseline scenario in which
the channel didn’t exist. They did not find a
similar significant effect for MSNBC.

[What makes Fox News so powerful?

Maybe its channel number.]

In Italy, it’s not that television made voters

more conservative. Instead, Durante said, it
seems to have made them more vulnerable
to the anti-establishment stances favored by
the country’s populist leaders of all
persuasions.

In the ’90s and early 2000s, Berlusconi was

“well positioned to benefit from the decline
in cognitive skills and civic engagement,”
they write, but by 2013, he was outflanked
by the insurgent Five Star Movement, whose
strong rhetoric won over the Mediaset-
affected voters who had once broken for
Berlusconi.

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Andrew Van Dam

Andrew Van Dam covers data and
economics. He previously worked for the
Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and
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