If you’ve been scratching your head the last few months trying to figure out how Americans got so conservative and why even some of your liberal friends have inched toward the middle, Dietram Scheufele might have the answer for you.
Scheufele, 33, is a mass communications professor at UW-Madison and was the lead researcher in an intriguing, soon to be published study that seems to confirm what progressives have suspected for a long time: people who get their news primarily from TV – which these days, unfortunately, means the vast majority of the country – do, in fact, tend to be more conservative.