That is you'd ask people about what news do they consume, and then you correlate that with their political attitudes, and you say, "Wow, we see a lot of separation and a high degree of connection between what my ideological priors are and whether or not I'm going to consume predominantly liberal or conservative media outlets," but you're doing something different. Much of the evidence that was animating, certainly the popular debate was drawn from survey research. He looks deeply at a bunch of data that looks at online consumption behaviors and has some really interesting findings to share, so let's give it a listen.Īndy, what a pleasure to meet you and have a chance to talk about your new paper, "Almost Everything in Moderation: New Evidence on Americans' Online Media Diets." Let's talk about the evidence. I talked to Andrew Guess who is assistant professor in the Politics Department at Princeton, who has a new paper that's in the American Journal of Political Science called "Almost Everything in Moderation: New Evidence on Americans' Online Media Diets," and tries to speak to precisely this concern by focusing in particular on people's consumption patterns of news, and political news in particular.
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Will, you talked to someone who tried to figure out whether we are consuming very different news, whether Democrats are reading very different news online than Republicans? William Howell:
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Yes, it definitely feels this way, so it would be good to look at the data and see whether that's indeed the case. Yes, we are eating expensive avocado toast with cheap coffee over here in Chicago. Oh, they're both delicious from my vantage point. What do we think? Is that a problem? When's the last time you guys had expensive avocado toast versus cheap coffee in a diner? William Howell: When it comes time to actually have an election or make an important decision, the American electorate is just not even up to the task, because the media consumption and the conversations are so partisan that we can't even agree on basic facts. When Joe Biden says something stupid, that's going to be passed around by all the conservatives, and they're all going to know about that. If Donald Trump says something stupid, then that's going to be passed around by all the liberals, and everyone's going to know about that. The concern is that we have these two Americas, and they don't even get the same news, they don't get the same information, they're not hearing the same arguments. If they have to read a paper, they maybe read the Wall Street Journal. There's the America in San Francisco that eats the overpriced avocado toast, and they read New York Times, and then there's the America in Kansas where they sip on cheap coffee in diners, and they watch Fox News. We are told frequently that there are two Americas. I'm Wioletta Dziuda, and this is Not Another Politics Podcast. Listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you enjoy podcasts.
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But what do the data say? Is it possible that a majority of us have a much more moderate media diet than we assume?Ī new paper by Andrew Guess, Assistant Professor of Politics at Princeton, provides a completely unique data set that complicates our assumptions about America’s “echo chambers” and media diets. We’re constantly told that we’re trapped in media “echo chambers”, that our media diets mirror our political leanings.