We can hold out hope that Yglesias and those who seek out self-affirmation in the guise of dispassionate analysis will encounter this critique.
“Conservatives don’t like to read,” the ever-confident Substacker Matt Yglesias declared on Monday.
With apologies to you, dear reader, for the painful experience you’re about to encounter, but this self-satisfied contention merits some deeper analysis.
Yglesias’s claim that right-of-center Americans prefer visual media while those on the left consume literature got a boost from YouGov’s late December survey studying the public’s reading habits. That poll did not break down readers by political ideology, but it did track their party affiliation. According to its findings, self-described Democrats consume an average of 10.6 books per year while Republicans read just 7.7. That’s a real discrepancy, but for both Democrats and Republicans, the median number of books read is two.
Importantly, these figures are self-reported, and they do not take into account direct sales or reader consumption habits measured by industry trackers using proprietary methods such as BookScan. More interesting is what they’re reading. Although the data are nearly ten years old, the University of Chicago’s 2017 investigation into reading habits by partisan ideology is illuminating.
“Conservative choices tended to cluster on the periphery of a discipline, relatively isolated books that are often bought with each other, but not with other books in the subject area,” the university’s Rob Mitchum wrote. “Books preferred by liberals are less clustered, more diverse, and lie closer to the center of a given discipline.” The University of North Carolina’s Feng Shi said that the study’s data indicated that conservatives and liberals both share an interest in the social sciences, but their motives differ. “One potential interpretation is that liberal readers prefer scientific puzzles, while conservative readers prefer problem-solving,” she said.
But what about the online universe? The website AllSides, which uses publicly available data to analyze the political leanings of various news and opinion websites against their traffic metrics, found that left and left-leaning sites do generate more overall engagement. But there are also more of them. Indeed, they are often “larger and older organizations that break more original stories than other outlets,” the site’s Joseph Ratliff wrote in late 2022.
Fox News’ online presence, for example, outperforms all other conservative websites by a significant margin (perhaps contributing to Yglesias’s thesis that liberals are too erudite to watch cable news, thus providing a face-saving explanation for Fox’s ratings successes). Importantly, though, as Ratliff’s analysis acknowledges, the traffic statistics cannot measure how much a reader is reading. If the same liberal visitor consumes material from five websites while the conservative reader visits only three, the figures will skew even if their time spent reading was the same. Liberal audiences, Ratliff’s analysis maintains, are more diffuse.
Which brings us to Substack and its readership figures, which prompted Yglesias’s chest-thumping triumphalism. His blog, Slow Boring, ranks 14th overall in readership. That’s a feat, and Yglesias’s contributions to the discourse are often valuable. But breaking into the top ten would compel him to lower his own standards quite a bit.
Heather Cox Richardson is by far the most successful individual blogger on Substack, but that’s nothing for the left to crow about. Millions of Americans still believe that Charlie Kirk’s murderer was a red-blooded right-winger, in part because she said as much. She spends her days flattering left-wing egos, chronicling America’s descent into a “dictatorship of Christian nationalism.”
The monomaniacal ex-MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan ranks highly, too. Readers just cannot get enough of his daily breakdown of Israeli perfidy and its continued execution of a “genocide” in Gaza that no independent observer can confirm. Paul Krugman and Robert Reich, two Clinton-era economic minds who have done more to advance conservatism than most conservatives, make the list. The humorist Andy Borowitz also features prominently. There must be a vast audience for curdled punchlines designed primarily to denigrate the columnist’s erstwhile employer, the Washington Post.
If these were conservatives’ reading habits, we’d be treated to an endless series of think pieces about how the conservative mind has siloed itself in a comforting information ecosystem that is allergic to questioning itself. Oh, wait . . . we were! Right-of-center readers were bombarded in the last decade with the self-congratulatory accusation from the left that the right had succumbed to “epistemic closure,” cosseting itself in a “reactionary,” “racist,” and, worst of all, “very online” cocoon.
Yglesias studiously ignores that the top Substacker slot goes to the Free Press, which can hardly be described as a bastion of left-wing like-think. Nor does he contend with the successful right-of-center media enterprises that spun off from their Substack incubator, like The Dispatch.
I know that was a chore to slog through, but you did it! Hopefully, you encountered something of value in all that arduous text. We can hold out hope that Yglesias and those who seek out self-affirmation in the guise of dispassionate analysis will encounter this critique. But, judging from the left’s reading habits, they’ll never see it.