As the options have grown, so have the fears. Are the politically disinterested taking advantage of the nearly limitless options to opt out of news entirely? Are the politically interested siloing themselves into “echo chambers”? In an eponymous Oxford Research Encylopedia article, I discuss what we think we know, and some concerns about how we can know. Some key points:
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Is the gap between how much the politically interested and politically disinterested know about politics increasing, as Post-broadcast Democracy posits? Figure 1 suggests not.
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Quantity rather than ratio: “If the dependent variable is partisan affect, how ‘selective’ one is may not matter as much as the net imbalance in consumption—the difference between the number of congenial and uncongenial bits consumed…”
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To measure how much political information a person is consuming, you must be able to distinguish political information from its complement. But what isn’t political information? “In this chapter, our focus is on consumption of varieties of political information. The genus is political information. And the species of this genus differ in congeniality, among other things. But what is political information? All information that influences people’s political attitudes or behaviors? If so, then limiting ourselves to news is likely too constraining. Popular television shows like The Handmaid’s Tale, Narcos, and Law and Order have clear political themes. … Shows like Will and Grace and The Cosby Show may be less clearly political, but they also have a political subtext.” (see Figure 4) … “Even if we limit ourselves to news, the domain is still not clear. Is news about a bank robbery relevant political information? What about Hillary Clinton’s haircut? To the extent that each of these affect people’s attitudes, they are arguably pertinent. “
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One of the challenges with inferring consumption based on domain level data is that domain level data are crude. Going to http://nytimes.com is not the same as reading political news. And measurement error may vary by the kind of person. For instance, say we label http://nytimes.com as political news. For the political junkie, the measurement error may be close to zero. For teetotalers, it may be close to 100% (see more).
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Show people a few news headlines along with the news source (you can randomize the source). What can you learn from a few such ‘trials’? You cannot learn what proportion of news they get from a particular source. you can learn the preferences, but not reliably. More from the paper: “Given the problems with self-reports, survey instruments that rely on behavioral measures are plausibly better. … We coded congeniality trichotomously: congenial, neutral, or uncongenial. The correlations between trials are alarmingly low. The polychoric correlation between any two trials range between .06 to .20. And the correlation between choosing political news in any two trials is between -.01 and .05.”
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Following up on the previous point: preference for a source which has a mean slant != preference for slanted news. “Current measures of [selective exposure] are beset with five broad problems. First is conceptual errors. For instance, people frequently equate preference for information from partisan sources with a preference for congenial information.”