New research shows that the great majority of people learn about political news from mainstream, relatively centrist media sources, not ideological websites or cable channels. However, relatively small numbers of partisans, especially Republicans, are heavy consumers of a highly polarized media diet.Lots of red flags as to the methodology though the researchers seem well-intentioned.
This dynamic helps explain why there is so much concern about “echo chambers,” even though most people don’t confine themselves to one.
To learn more about where people get their political news, Andy Guess, a postdoctoral researcher in social media and politics at New York University, recruited a nationally representative YouGov online survey panel. The nearly 1,400 panelists agreed to take part in a survey and to anonymously share data on their website visits over a three-week period in early 2015. This approach avoids the pitfalls of many previous studies, which typically ask people to recall their past news consumption — an approach that is plagued with measurement error. These website visits were then matched to estimates of media outlet “alignment” that are based on the self-described ideology of people who share articles from the website on Facebook.
The resulting data, which are reported in a new working paper by Mr. Guess, show the news diet of most respondents was remarkably centrist on average for both Democrats and Republicans alike. The two most common destinations for political news in his data were MSN.com and AOL.com, two large and relatively neutral online news portals.
One of my biggest concerns is how they rate the ideological skew of the different news sources and which ones they elected to include or not.
In terms of assessing the political skew of media sources, we know that the politics of reporters in all mainstream media skew much more liberal than the average American. Even reporters (as opposed to the editors) for such "conservative" news sources as Wall Street Journal and Fox News skew left.
The calibration that they provide seems wrong to me. I do not use either Fox or Breitbart as primary, or even secondary, sources of current news. But from years of episodic exposure, I would have judged Breitbart to be a genuinely provocative right-oriented new site comparable in nature and (opposite) degree as a left site such as Mother Jones or Daily Kos. The random sampling of news articles I have seen from Fox are nowhere near as provocative or ideological as Breitbart but they are rated basically the same for the study purposes. So something seems off on the calibration. Might be me but, given their methodology and given that the ratings are by opinion rather than empirical measure, I suspect that they err in their rankings.
In the original paper, they allude to one of the biggest right-oriented sites, drudgereport.com, but I don't see any data related to Drudge in their analysis. Drudge would be over there with Breitbart. Did they omit Drudge, and if so why? Drudge is one of the single largest sources of traffic for both the Washington Post as well as the New York Times. Not in a friendly way. He will link some of their more egregious reporting which sends tidal waves of offended conservatives over to comment.
A final concern. They identify MSN and AOL as centrist news aggregators. Again, I don't use either source but glancing at the sources for their articles, most of the aggregation appears to be from significantly left leaning publications. Throwing in a few sources from WSJ or Fox doesn't significantly leaven the skew.
So those are some of the concerns.
What are the conclusions from the study? That most readers are centrist in their news sourcing but that the ideological extremists among both Republicans and Democrats spend more time on their respective more extreme new sources. That's a very neutral interpretation. Not wrong so much as not quite revealing. Look at the distribution of the news sources, keeping in mind that MSN and AOL at the center are actually about 70-80% left leaning in their aggregation.
The conclusion again was:
New research shows that the great majority of people learn about political news from mainstream, relatively centrist media sources, not ideological websites or cable channels.But that's not quite what those graphs show. Rather, it is not all that they show.
A different description would be:
Democrats get all their news from left-leaning media and Conservatives get most their news from left-leaning media sources.The claim that Democrats aren't in an echo chamber rests on the fact that significant numbers of them get information from AOL and MSN which are only 70-80% left leaning. Democrats read virtually no right-leaning news sources.
Meanwhile, Republicans clearly get the great majority of their news from left-leaning sources. They also happen to get some 20%(?) of their news from right leaning sources. One might say that they are much more committed to reading diversely than are Democrats if one wanted to be snarky.
Somebody has already made this point elsewhere, perhaps Jonathan Haidt. In fact, I think it is Haidt who did research asking left leaning and right leaning people to describe the policy positions of their opposite number. Around foreign policy, religion in school, abortion, safe spaces, gun control, all the normal hot button issues. People on the right were able to accurately describe left policy positions whereas people on the left were unable to accurately describe the policy positions of the right. The conclusion, or speculation, of the research was that people on the right aren't necessarily smarter than those on the left. They are simply more exposed to the left's positions than those on the left are exposed to the positions of those on the right.
This new research seems to support that conclusion.
Posts
re: "Somebody has already made this point elsewhere, perhaps Jonathan Haidt. In fact, I think it is Haidt who did research asking left leaning and right leaning people to describe the policy positions of their opposite number. Around foreign policy, religion in school, abortion, safe spaces, gun control, all the normal hot button issues. People on the right were able to accurately describe left policy positions whereas people on the left were unable to accurately describe the policy positions of the right. The conclusion, or speculation, of the research was that people on the right aren't necessarily smarter than those on the left. They are simply more exposed to the left's positions than those on the left are exposed to the positions of those on the right."
ReplyDeleteYes, it was Haidt.
But he was not talking about news sources or echo chambers.
He was talking about moral foundations: the "evolved psychological mechanisms" that are the universal building blocks of ideologies/moralities.
Conservative morality is built on all six moral foundations in relatively equal balance.
Liberal morality weights the "individualizing" foundations of care/harm, fairness/cheating, and liberty/oppression as more important than the "binding," or cohering, or "community" focused foundations of loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and purity/degradation.
Haidt describes a study in which he examines how well liberals, conservatives, and moderates understand each other. From page 334 of The Righteous Mind:
ReplyDelete"When I speak to liberal audiences about the three “binding” foundations – Loyalty, Authority, Sanctity – I find that many in the audience don’t just fail to resonate; they actively reject these concerns as immoral. Loyalty to a group shrinks the moral circle; it is the basis of racism and exclusion, they say. Authority is oppression. Sanctity is religious mumbo-jumbo whose only function is to suppress female sexuality and justify homophobia.
In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Qyestionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right)’ Who was best able to pretend to be the other?
The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the whole study came when liberals answered the Care and Fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with questions such as “One of the worst things a person could do is hurt a defenseless animal” or ”Justice is the most important requirement for a society,” liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree. If you have a moral matrix built primarily on intuitions about care and fairness (as equality), and you listen to the Reagan [i.e., conservative] narrative, what else could you think? Reagan seems completely unconcerned about the welfare of drug addicts, poor people, and gay people. He’s more interested in fighting wars and telling people how to run their sex lives.
If you don’t see that Reagan is pursuing positive values of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity, you almost have to conclude that Republicans see no positive value in Care and Fairness. You might even go as far as Michael Feingold, a theater critic for the liberal newspaper the Village Voice, when he wrote:
Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don’t give a hoot about human beings, either can’t or won’t. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they causeany more harm)3
One of the many ironies in this quotation is that it shows the inability of a theater critic-who skillfully enters fantastical imaginary worlds for a living-to imagine that Republicans act within a moral matrix that differs from his own. Morality binds and blinds."
Thanks Independent Whig. I like Haidt's work.
ReplyDeleteI did not express myself well. Haidt's work revealing the discrepancy between conservative and liberal understanding of one another's positions is indeed the foundation. But somewhere I have read or participated in a discussion about why that discrepancy might exist. I know someone has proposed that the discrepancy in comprehension arises because conservatives perforce are surrounded by liberal news sources whereas liberals would have to actively seek out conservative news sources.
In other words, a media that strongly skews liberal, unintentionally educates conservatives about the nuances of liberal positions; correspondingly, it reinforces liberals in their worldview and shields them from conservative interpretations.
I don't recall who came up with that hypothesis, but this data seems to support it.