The study is based on web browsing data and survey responses from over 7000 participants in six developed democracies. The results show that political content is consumed significantly less often on news websites than non-political content such as sport or entertainment. When users consume political news, the news sources often align with their ideological preferences. Conservative participants from the United States, for example, most frequently obtained political news from Fox News. This finding is particularly pronounced in the United States, but a similar, albeit less pronounced, pattern can also be seen in European countries such as Spain and Italy. A look at the duration of individual news usage also shows that people engage more intensively with political news that corresponds with their own political ideology. “The results are largely consistent with the literature on media systems and recent studies from the USA. What is new, however, is that users are so strongly guided by their interests, such as politics or entertainment, when selecting news sources,” says Sebastian Stier, co-author of the study. Stier is Professor of Computational Social Science at the University of Mannheim and head of the Computational Social Science department at GESIS.
Full press release