RESUMEN
Partisan segregation within the news audience buffers many Americans from countervailing political views, posing a risk to democracy. Empirical studies of the online media ecosystem suggest that only a small minority of Americans, driven by a mix of demand and algorithms, are siloed according to their political ideology. However, such research omits the comparatively larger television audience and often ignores temporal dynamics underlying news consumption. By analyzing billions of browsing and viewing events between 2016 and 2019, with a novel framework for measuring partisan audiences, we first estimate that 17% of Americans are partisan-segregated through television versus roughly 4% online. Second, television news consumers are several times more likely to maintain their partisan news diets month-over-month. Third, TV viewers' news diets are far more concentrated on preferred sources. Last, partisan news channels' audiences are growing even as the TV news audience is shrinking. Our results suggest that television is the top driver of partisan audience segregation among Americans.
RESUMEN
"Fake news," broadly defined as false or misleading information masquerading as legitimate news, is frequently asserted to be pervasive online with serious consequences for democracy. Using a unique multimode dataset that comprises a nationally representative sample of mobile, desktop, and television consumption, we refute this conventional wisdom on three levels. First, news consumption of any sort is heavily outweighed by other forms of media consumption, comprising at most 14.2% of Americans' daily media diets. Second, to the extent that Americans do consume news, it is overwhelmingly from television, which accounts for roughly five times as much as news consumption as online. Third, fake news comprises only 0.15% of Americans' daily media diet. Our results suggest that the origins of public misinformedness and polarization are more likely to lie in the content of ordinary news or the avoidance of news altogether as they are in overt fakery.
