In this polarized age, have citizens retreated into information cocoons of like-minded media sources?  A new Pew Research Center report found that the outlets people name as their main sources of information about news and politics are strongly correlated with their political views. Almost half of all respondents that Pew classified as consistent conservatives named Fox News as their primary news source, while consistent liberals were disproportionately likely to name National Public Radio (13 percent), MSNBC (12 percent) and The New York Times (10 percent). These results are in line with studies suggesting that people tend to select news and information that is consistent with their political preferences in controlled settings.  The Pew study has been widely interpreted to mean that people are living in partisan and ideological echo chambers — a fear that has been frequently expressed as new communication technologies have expanded the media choices of consumers. One of the most famous examples is Cass Sunstein’s “Republic.com,” a 2001 book that warned of a future in which people could filter out unwelcome viewpoints from the information they consume, potentially creating a more extreme and misinformed citizenry.  But have the predictions of widespread media echo chambers really come true? It’s hard to tell using questions like Pew’s, which ask people to self-report where they get their news. People can be biased in what outlets they choose to name or forgetful of the media they did consume in different settings and contexts. In particular, liberals or conservatives may be prone to exaggerating their exposure to ideologically consistent news outlets. Naming Fox or MSNBC in response to a question like the one Pew used may thus be more of a marker of tribal affiliation than a direct measure of news consumption.  The picture looks a lot brighter when social scientists have analyzed measures of people’s news consumption in the real world. It turns out that the media people are actually exposed to both online and offline is much more diverse and heterogeneous than people’s self-reports suggest.  Consider, for instance, the results of a study by the University of California, Los Angeles, political scientist Michael LaCour, who analyzed data on television and radio exposure among a national sample of respondents who carried mobile devices that recorded ambient sound.  Contrary to predictions of widespread polarization in media consumption among partisan lines, he found that the news diets of Democrats and Republicans had very similar patterns of media slant, which he estimated by comparing characteristic patterns of language in their reporting with the speech of members of Congress (for instance, how frequently they use the phrase “death tax,” which is more frequently used by Republicans than Democrats). Partisans from both sides were most likely to consume news from outlets that were estimated to be relatively centrist, such as network morning shows and evening news broadcasts.  Moreover, the ideological news that people did see or hear (such as shows on MSNBC or Fox) was relatively balanced between sources with a shared or opposing point of view — only a tiny handful of respondents got more than 90 percent of their news from ideologically congenial sources.  Similarly, an analysis of online news consumption data by the University of Chicago economists Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro found that most people tended to visit a relatively balanced and centrist set of websites. While they found some ideological segregation in news consumption behavior online, they estimated that it was far smaller than we observe in people’s families or social networks. Similarly, their data indicate that we’re more segregated by ideology in where we live (at the ZIP code level) than in the news sites we visit.  What about social media? Doesn’t it encourage echo chamber behavior? Not according to a paper by the New York University political scientist Pablo Barberá. It is true, he finds, that people tend to follow like-minded individuals on Twitter — about two-thirds of the people followed by the median Twitter user in the United States share the user’s political leanings. But his analysis also shows that those American users who are embedded in even modestly diverse networks tend to follow a less ideologically homogeneous group of people over time. Rather than polarizing us further, encountering differing views online may encourage people to broaden their information stream.  In short, while it’s still possible to live in a political bubble of your own choosing, the best evidence suggests that very few people are getting their news only from like-minded outlets. Why, then, do so many Americans seem to live in different political realities?  The problem isn’t the news we consume, it seems, but the values and identities that shape how we interpret that information — most notably, our partisan beliefs. In other words, Democrats and Republicans don’t see the world so differently because they see different news; rather, they see the news differently because they’re Democrats and Republicans in the first place.
A study asserts that liberals and conservatives get their news mainly from like-minded sources, but other research contradicts this finding.