Distilling partisanship
Finally, we found an imbalance between partisan TV news channels and the broader TV news environment. Our observations revealed that Americans are turning away from national TV news generally in substantial numbers—and crucially, this exodus is more from centrist news buckets than from left- or right-leaning ones. Within the remaining TV news audience, we found movement from broadcast news to cable news, trending toward MSNBC and Fox News.
Together, these trends reveal a counterintuitive finding: Although the overall TV news audience is shrinking, the partisan TV news audience is growing. This means that the audience as a whole is in the process of being “distilled”; in other words, the remaining TV viewers are growing increasingly partisan, and the partisan segment of TV news consumers is on the rise.
Why it matters
Exposure to opposing views is critical for functional democratic processes. It allows for self-reflection and tempers hostility toward political outgroups, whereas interacting only with similar views in political echo chambers makes people more entrenched in their own opinions. If echo chambers truly are as widespread as recent attention has made them out to be, it can have major consequences for the health of democracy.
Our findings suggest that television—not the web—is the top driver of partisan audience segregation among Americans. It is important to note that the vast majority of Americans still consume relatively balanced news diets.
However, given that the partisan TV news audience alone consumes more minutes of news than the entire online news audience, it may be worth devoting more attention to this huge and increasingly politicized part of the information ecosystem.
Homa Hosseinmardi is an associate research scientist in computational social science at the University of Pennsylvania.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.