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Norms Impact

Beyond Polarization: Right-Wing News as a Quasi-religious Phenomenon – Marcus Mann, Daniel Winchester, 2025

When political news consumption hardens into devotion, our shared evidentiary baseline collapses—and the democratic norm of accountable governance becomes negotiable.

General

Jun 1, 2025

Sources

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/07352751251326951

Summary

Mann and Winchester’s 2025 study frames right-wing news consumption as a quasi-religious phenomenon rather than a conventional partisan media habit.The shift reclassifies propaganda dynamics as a form of authority-making, where media brands and personalities function as identity institutions that can override shared epistemic standards. The practical consequence is a public sphere more vulnerable to misinformation, conspiracy narratives, and norm-breaking political conduct because factual correction competes against devotion-based loyalty.

Reality Check

Devotion-based media authority is the gateway drug to democratic breakdown because it trains citizens to treat power as sacred and facts as optional, weakening our ability to defend our own rights through evidence and law. Nothing in the provided context describes a discrete prosecutable act by identifiable officials; the conduct here is institutional and cultural, not a chargeable crime on this record. The danger is structural: the objectivity norm and public-sphere accountability mechanisms lose force when misinformation and conspiracy narratives operate as identity commitments rather than claims subject to falsification.

Detail

The source is a June 2025 scholarly publication by Marcus Mann and Daniel Winchester, titled “Beyond Polarization: Right-Wing News as a Quasi-religious Phenomenon.”

The provided context consists of the work’s reference list, which anchors the study in prior research on partisan media, misinformation, polarization, conspiracism, and institutional journalism norms. Citations include reporting and scholarship on Fox News’s internal election-night coverage decisions and management departures (The New York Times and The Washington Post, January 2021), the Dominion defamation settlement with Fox ($787.5 million, April 2023), research on misinformation and selective exposure in U.S. elections and social media ecosystems, and work connecting conspiracy belief to quasi-religious cognition and political devotion.

The reference list also includes foundational texts on charisma, public sphere theory, and the objectivity norm in journalism, as well as empirical studies on COVID-19 information effects and radicalization pathways on platforms such as YouTube.