A Window to the World: Americans' Exposure to Political News From Foreign Media Outlets

Abstract

Political communication research overwhelmingly focuses on domestic media. Internet access has relaxed geographic constraints on news use to create an- other possibility: exposure to political coverage from foreign media outlets. We study the frequency and form of foreign media exposure in the United States using individual-level web browsing data and a content analysis of the news this sample encountered. This reveals foreign media exposure is widespread and internationally-oriented. 85% of these individuals visited a foreign source. Foreign media accounted for 7% of all news website visits. In a within-subject analysis of over three million visits to foreign and domestic websites, individuals were substantially more likely to encounter foreign affairs coverage, and less likely to reach coverage of U.S. domestic politics, when visiting foreign news sources. These findings show how new opportunities created by a changing media landscape shape public engagement with international politics.

When Survey Science Met Web Tracking: Presenting an Error Framework for Metered Data

“…In this step, the definitions are used to classify the specific information, for instance with coders looking at each URL and judging by using the given definitions. This can be done manually (e.g., using MTurk coders, Peterson et al, 2018 ), using ad hoc ML algorithms (e.g., supervised ML to categorise the topic of news articles, Peterson & Damm, 2019 ), or using already available third‐party ML algorithms (e.g., Google's Vision AI, Bosch et al, 2019 ). Manual coding can prompt the same errors as for survey data, that is, that different individuals coding the same raw data have different judgments or that coders systematically misinterpret and misclassify some information.…”