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

Are News Audiences Increasingly Fragmented? A Cross-National Comparative Analysis of Cross-Platform News Audience Fragmentation and Duplication

“…Recently, several follow‐up studies have utilized and developed this approach. Weeks et al () also found evidence of very high duplication specifically among audiences for news outlets. They used 2008 National Election Survey data from the United States to show that general interest media outlets such as local newspapers and CNN exist at the core of networks, meaning that their audiences overlap with other outlets in the network more than those with partisan output.…”

“…One way of approaching the question of audience fragmentation versus audience duplication across media platforms and across different media systems is through the audience‐centric approach developed by James Webster and his collaborators (Taneja, ; Taneja & Webster, ; Webster, ; Webster & Ksiazek, ; Weeks et al, ; Yuan & Ksiazek, ). According to this stream of work, audiences within media environments can be characterized by placing them on a spectrum that ranges from “fragmented” to “duplicated.” One determines this characterization by measuring the degree of audience “overlap” between each pair of outlets within the environment, which is simply the proportion of the population who use both.…”

“…On the one hand, a number of prominent authors have warned against the social and political implications of what they see as a more and more fragmented media environment, characterized by self-selecting news and opinion "echo chambers" (Berry & Sobieraj, 2014;Jamieson & Cappella, 2008) and more personalized, segmented, or "balkanized" audiences (Katz, 1996;Stroud, 2011;Sunstein, 2009;Turow, 1997), driven at least in part by the development of digital media. On the other hand, a growing number of audience researchers have pushed back and argued that, beneath what James Webster (2005) has called the "veneer of fragmentation," there is a high degree of audience duplication, suggesting a "massively overlapping culture," even in a time of unprecedented media choice (Webster, 2014, p. 98; see also Gentzkow & Shapiro, 2011;Trilling & Schoenbach, 2013;Webster & Ksiazek, 2012;Weeks, Ksiazek, & Holbert, 2016).…”

The echo chamber is overstated: the moderating effect of political interest and diverse media

“…Research into fragmentation, polarization, and echo chambers has surfaced conflicting results. While audiences are fragmented, most individuals continue to rely on at least some more general sources of news and political information such as non-partisan newspapers (online and offline) or television broadcasts (Newman et al, 2017;Weeks et al, 2016). Furthermore, when selecting media, individuals may choose to access information that confirms their beliefs more frequently but they are less likely to actively avoid information that contradicts their views (Garrett, 2009).…”

“…Examinations of selective exposure have shown that individuals do tend to expose themselves to information and ideas they agree with more often (Iyengar & Hahn, 2009;Lawrence, Sides, & Farrell, 2010) but they do not tend to avoid information and ideas which are conflicting (Garrett, 2009). Even among partisans in the US, the media diet of Republicans and Democrats is in fact quite similar (Weeks, Ksiazek, & Holbert, 2016). While some have found evidence of echo chambers on Twitter (Barberá, Jost, Nagler, Tucker, & Bonneau, 2015;Conover et al, 2011;Himelboim, McCreery, & Smith, 2013), others have shown that the trend does not persist on Facebook (Bakshy, Messing, & Adamic, 2015;Goel, Mason, & Watts, 2010).…”