Commentary

News Filter Bubbles Isolate One-Fifth Of Audiences

  • by March 10, 2020
This year's presidential election has brought renewed scrutiny of how people's political views affect their news consumption. Pew Research Center has studied those audience habits, finding the United States lacks a single news sourcet hat's trusted by most adults.

While it isn't surprising that liberals and conservatives have contrasting views of the news, Pew found those differences are especially extreme among people whose news consumption is limited to outlets that support their political views.

Twenty percent of Democrats and independents who lean Democratic get political news only from outlets with left-leaning audiences. At the opposite end of the spectrum, 18% of all Republicans and independents who lean Republican get their political news only from outlets with right-leaning audiences, according to the survey of about 12,000 adults.

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The most popular source of news for Democrats in a left-leaning audience news bubble was CNN, cited by 21% of respondents, followed by NPR at 18% and The New York Times at 9%. For Republicans in a right-leaning bubble, 70% named Fox News as their main source of political news.

Democrats in a left-leaning news bubble tend to be much younger than Republicans in a right-leaning bubble, exacerbating the differences in their news media consumption.

Almost three fourths (74%) of Democrats in a left-leaning news bubbles are ages 18 to 49, compared with only 31% of Republicans in a right-leaning bubble who are in that demographic group, according to Pew.

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