Partisan media effects beyond one-shot experimental designs

Abstract

Previous study demonstrates that partisans perceive in-party news outlets as fair, and out-party news outlets as unfair. However, much of this study relies on one-shot designs. We create an ecologically valid design that randomly assigns participants to news feeds within a week-long online news portal where the balance of in-party and out-party news outlets has been manipulated. We find that sustained exposure to a feed that features out-party news media attenuates Democrats' beliefs that Fox News is unfair, but the same is not true for Republican's perceptions of MSNBC's fairness. Unexpectedly, repeated exposure to in-party news did increase Republicans' beliefs that Fox News is unfair. This study updates our understanding of partisan news effects in a fragmented online news environment.

Consuming cross-cutting media causes learning and moderates attitudes: A field experiment with Fox News viewers

“…See also related work byBail et al (2018) andSearles et al (2022), which do not study partisan media Bail et al (2018). expose participants to individual tweets researchers chose from elected officials, non-profits, and other sources and find that exposure to these tweets increases polarization.…”

“…expose participants to individual tweets researchers chose from elected officials, non-profits, and other sources and find that exposure to these tweets increases polarization. Exposure to individual tweets selected by researchers is distinct from naturalistic exposure to an entire media source Searles et al (2022). created a custom online news portal similar to Google News that was randomized to have no Fox News or MSNBC stories (baseline stream), the baseline stream with Fox News stories added, or the baseline stream with MSNBC stories added.…”

Online engagement with 2020 election misinformation and turnout in the 2021 Georgia runoff election

“…We hope that future efforts to identify natural experiments or run carefully and ethically designed randomized experiments will be better able to assess causality in the effects of endorsement of or opposition to conspiracy theories on behavioral and electoral outcomes. Importantly, this topic is likely to require message-level randomization, rather than the already-challenging and intensive source-level randomizations used to study the effects of partisan media generally ( 10 , 11 ), ## wide-ranging effects of social media access ( 13 ), and the effects of independent media under authoritarian regimes ( 14 – 16 ). Because of this, such efforts may require substantial funding and/or intensive collaboration from industry ( 84 ), perhaps along with political elites contributing effective messages—such as one from Donald Trump himself ( 85 ).…”

“… * Estimating effects of specific claims presents distinct challenges relative to already-impressive efforts to estimate overall media effects by source, such as partisan TV ( 10 ), curated news feed ( 11 ), populist radio ( 12 ), social media ( 13 ), or independent media under authoritarian regimes ( 14 – 16 ). An increasingly nationalized political and media environment ( 17 , 18 ) also limits variation in content from location to location.…”

“… ## Searles et al ( 11 ) incentivized users to opt in to curated news feeds that randomly varied the sources to which users were exposed. Although difficult and perhaps not possible for the specific Georgia runoff case, we suspect that, with sufficient funding, this design could be adapted to selectively prevent election-misinformation content (randomly removing misinformation may address ethical issues associated with randomly exposing individuals to misinformation), with near real-time crowd-sourced labeling, and be linked to offline identities and turnout, especially if these studies could be substantially larger and with participants more strongly incentivized to (primarily) access that news feed.…”