Paramount Skydance CEO has repeatedly cited the statistic when laying out the approach that CBS News and potentially CNN would take
During an early March appearance on CNBC, the Paramount Skydance chief executive, David Ellison, cited a statistic he has come to rely on when laying out his editorial approach for CBS News and, potentially, the cable network he has made a deal to own, CNN. The young media mogul said the networks will prioritize reaching “the 70% of Americans and really around the world that identify as center-left, as center-right”.
The idea of an unaddressed center ground is a powerful talking point. In a world of increasingly partisan politics, Ellison’s promise to address the unheard, silent majority packs a punch – and fits nicely with the approach of one of his most high-profile lieutenants, the heterodox commentator Bari Weiss.
Unfortunately, it appears that Ellison’s 70% figure is not supported by publicly available polling data on the ideological orientation of Americans.
A recent YouGov survey – conducted last fall and published in January – found that only 40% of US adult citizens identify as “center-left”, “center” or “center-right”, not 70%.
It doesn’t matter anyways because most people will always claim to be “in the middle” because the people to either extreme are always loudest.
You poll them on policies, and suddenly everyone is a “far left extremist” for wanting safety nets and basic standards for human existence.
You ask right/center/left at face value, and the answers will always be about the same despite what’s going on in reality.
To put it more directly, anyone with a political ideology based on having a position relative to two or more other positions seems constantly so desperate to appear like an enlightened, balanced thinker while also having a political that’s nearly entirely worthless. They’re great at voting against stuff but their spines are jelly and it’s so fucking hard to get them to commit to fuckin’ anything.
And it carries over in their lives! Trying to get a hard opinion out of them on anything is so hard! They’re so scared of being “wrong” that they constantly half-ass everything they do and I’m so tired of it. Just commit to something, please!
(Maybe we need to start running actual super far left parties in the world to centralize regular leftist parties to get these people to finally behave lol)
Yes, entirely unironically. It’s a negotiation technique called “anchoring”.