The Columbia Journalism Review has just published a thorough study of media polarization. The takeaway: conservatives are more polarized than liberals.

Not that this should be a surprise to anyone who has paid attention, but it does show up one of the most pervasive false equivalencies of recent times: that liberals and conservatives are equally partisan, and each shares the blame for the current political divide.

That simply isn’t true, and it is definitely untrue in how the divide formed in the first place. Where liberals have diverged, they have done so in *reaction* to what conservatives were doing, not in concert with them. Conservatives formed the split in the media; conservatives created the hyper-partisan atmosphere in D.C. All those stories about how “divisive” Obama was were baloney; if you reach out in cooperation and the other person hits you over the head, the divisiveness is not equally shared. It takes two to tango, but the dance can be broken by just one party.

To this day, even in reaction to the madness of right-wing intransigence and the existence of a president like Trump, liberals still cling to the traditional mainstream sources of information which adhere to strict standards of objectivity and fact—while conservatives are, as the common perception quite rightly holds, tightly clustered around deeply partisan nodes of information such as Breitbart and InfoWars, cesspools of such breathtakingly insane fiction that it beggars the imagination.

In short, it is not a conceit that liberals are more fact-based and conservatives cling to their bubble. It is an objectively observable fact.