Longitudinal Patterns of News Audience Polarisation around the World

The next speaker in this opening session at I-POLHYS 2024 is Richard Fletcher, whose focus is in polarisation amongst news audiences. Has such polarisation increased over time, and how does it differ between news audiences in different countries? Polarisation is defined here as the behaviour of news audiences in their news choices, understood here in news outlet choices across a left-to-right political spectrum; this media system structure may also parallel the structure of the political party system, of course.

Some of this is also related to the concept of partisan selective exposure, and studies that explored whether such exposure increase with a shift to online news sources. But studies have also shown that news discovery through search engines and social media has tended to expose users to a greater variety of news sources, rather than limiting their exposure to a smaller number of more extreme sources.

Unfortunately much of the research in this area has tended to favour the US, and is cross-sectional rather than longitudinal. Work building on the transnational data of the Reuters Institute Digital News Report shows that news audience polarisation varies substantially across countries, and tends to be higher online than offline. The data enable researchers to calculate an average audience slant for different outlets in the same country, and point for instance to a much wider distance between left- and right-leaning audiences in the US than in Germany. The audience size for each individual outlet should also be taken into account in assessing this, of course.

Compared to a theoretical maximum of (bipolar) News audience polarisation, the US reaches some 32%, while Ireland reaches only 7%; differences between online and offline news consumption can also be identified, but these largely follow the per-country patterns rather than showing any systematic difference between online and offline media.

Further, longitudinal changes can also be assessed, and the data used here cover the years 2015 to 2023. Preliminary analysis shows little change in news audience polarisation in the UK (around 23%); a slight rise in Italy from 2020 onwards (15%); a solid increase but from low levels in Germany (below 10%); and the US still far ahead of the other countries; as well as a stable average of around 15% across the seven countries studied here. Online and offline are some one to two percentage points apart overall, and online news use seems to explain changes in individual countries better, but more work to understand these patterns is required. All of this still presupposes a left-right political scale, too – which is still relevant, but does not necessarily capture all political ideologies particularly well.