Are you only interested in things you agree with?

That looks to be the view of many people according to the findings of the latest Politics Home Impact Tracker.

The tracker asks: “Below is a list of news stories that the media have focused on this week. Looking back over the week, please say which stories, if any, have most interested you. You may choose up to three.”

The overall figures show some interesting trends – the top story getting interest was ID cards (with 31%) just beating the story about two police dogs dying in a hot patrol car (29%). Yes, that’s right – a hard political story beat an animal tragedy story for interest from the public. In addition to those two, the renationalisation of the East Coast rail line also got more interest than the ongoing story of Michael Jackson’s death, a finding that raises some interesting questions about some of the media’s editorial judgements.

But what really caught my eye was the variation in the results when looked at by party affiliation. It’s perhaps no surprise that Conservative and Lib Dem supporters were far more likely to find the ID cards story interesting than Labour supporters. After all, they are both more likely to be opposed to ID cards, and generally opponents think ID cards are a much bigger deal than supporters.

It goes on though. Labour and Lib Dem supporters were much more interested in the railway renationalisation than Conservatives; Conservative and Lib Dems were more interested than Labour in the criticism of Michael Martin being given a peerage; Labour and Lib Dems were more interested than Conservatives in the news that George Osborne’s mortgage expense claims are being investigated and so on.

It looks as if people’s interest in a story is driven to a significant extent by the degree to which they agree with it. Don’t like renationalisation? Not interested in news of it happening then.

People are, and should be, free to make those sorts of choices about what interests them. If they are only interested in hearing about things that suit the views they already have, that’s their right. But that narrowness of outlook is not good for society and democracy.

It is also an outlook that the internet makes it much easier to follow. Online it’s very easy to pick and choose the news that interests you and ignore the rest. It’s a point Cass Sunstein made in his book Republic.com, first published in 2001. (The second edition of his book is available from Amazon).

In his conclusion, Cass Sunstein quoted John Stuart Mill:

It is hardly possible to overstate the value, in the present state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with other persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar … Such communication has always been … one of the primary sources of progress.

And so, I’m off to read the Daily Mail, again.