Partisan Enclaves or Shared Media Experiences? A Network Approach to Understanding Citizens’ Political News Environments

Abstract

The abundance of political media outlets raises concerns that citizens isolate themselves to likeminded news, leaving the public with infrequent shared media experiences and little exposure to disagreeable information. Network analysis of 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey data (N = 57,967) indicates these worries are exaggerated, as general interest news outlets like local newspapers and non-partisan television news are central to the public’s media environment. Although there is some variation between the media diets of Republicans and Democrats (FOX News and conservative talk radio are central to Republicans’ information network), neither group appears to engage in active avoidance of disagreeable information. Individuals across the political spectrum are not creating partisan “echo chambers” but instead have political media repertoires that are remarkably similar.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 103 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.