Nehaveigur

[Larry] Gross and several of his colleagues once did a fascinating bit of research to demonstrate what television of that era was capable of. He analyzed the responses of a large group of people who were asked how they felt about the biggest hot-button racial issues of the 1970s, such as: Should students be bused to new schools in order to integrate them? Should it be permissible to discriminate on the basis of race when it comes to renting or selling homes? Should there be laws against interracial marriage? On each of those issues, liberals, moderates, and conservatives were far apart. No surprise there. But then Gross singled out the responses of the members of these groups who watched a lot of television. This changed everything. Liberals, moderates, and conservatives, in most cases, disagreed strongly on hot-button issues only if they didn’t watch a lot of television. But the more television people of all ideological persuasions watched, the more they started to agree […] “I always like to quote this line from a Scottish writer, Andrew Fletcher,” Gross said. ” ‘If I can write the songs of a nation, I don’t care who writes their laws.’ ”

This is from The Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.