Top Highlights

• Scholarship on media effects has evolved to teach us that media audiences are not passive receptors but are instead active processors who interpret media messages through their own lenses and biases.21 If local newspapers are not covering
• shallow. It overlooks that much of political understanding is not about facts; it is about how we see those facts (Bartels 2008, chap. 5; Nyhan and Reifler 2010). Support for less government among lower-income people is often derided as the opinions of people who have been duped. But the stands taken in favor of small
• government delineated in this book are rooted in views of the world that carry a great deal of meaning for the people that hold them. Listening in on these conversations, it is hard to conclude that the people I studied believe what they do because they have been hoodwinked. Their views are rooted in identities and values, as well as in economic pe...
• A politics of resentment stems from and reinforces political differences that have become personal. In a politics of resentment, we
• treat differences in our political points of view as fundamental differences in who we are as human beings. I have focused on rural