Essential Question: Has the media become an echo chamber of political ideologies and created the polarization we now have in American politics?

As you attempt to create your questions, your starting point should be looking at what sort of factual evidence there is concerning polarization of media. First, you might note that the periodical press has been intensely polarized since its inception. For example, in early nineteenth-century Britain, the Westminster Review was the organ of the Benthamites or Westminster Radicals, the Edinburgh Review tended to be associated with the Whigs, and the Quarterly Review was associated with the Tories. However, there is good evidence that media has become increasingly polarized in recent decades. As people move away from traditional media such as traditional newspapers and television news, they become increasingly likely to read only sources that echo their own political ideologies. In particular, the algorithms designed to provide people with content that is of interest and relevance to them on social media can lead to people living in a media bubble in which they are not exposed to ideas that differ from their own. However, simply observing that political polarization and media fragmentation exists simultaneously is not sufficient to prove a causal relationship. As you create your questions for this assignment, you might want to think about the problem of the relationship between causation and correlation. Thus, a possible example of a question might be as follows:
Although we can see increasing polarization in politics and in the existence of media outlets that are "echo chambers of political ideologies," simply observing that the two phenomena coexist is not proof of causation. We need to consider whether media fragmentation causes political polarization, whether political polarization causes media fragmentation, whether the two are part of a mutually reinforcing feedback loop, or whether some third phenomenon can account for both observable effects. Can you think of any phenomena that would explain both media fragmentation and political polarization?