Partisan Media Exposure and Attitudes towards News Brands

It’s Friday morning and I’m in a casino on the Gold Coast of Queensland, so this must be the start of the ICA 2024 conference. I’m in a session on polarisation, and we start with a paper by Minchul Kim on the prediction of partisan media exposure through attitudes towards news brands. The interest here is in the United States, where the assumption is that partisan exposure might result in widely diverging worldviews.

Conventional approaches expect partisans to see certain news brands as ideologically aligned or counter to their own views, and to choose to engage or avoid news brands on that basis; this might be true for highly partisan brands, while more generic brands are also being used by partisans who have an inherent if mild distrust in those brands. It is also wrong to assume that partisans entirely avoid counter-attitudinal news brands. And further, the typical arrangement of news brands in existing research on a simple left-to-right and highly US-centric political spectrum is also overly simplistic – not least because political independents in the US are an important and growing group.

Can we replace individual party identification with a different attribute, then – for example by starting with attitudes towards news brands in a high-choice media environment? The project conducted an online experiment with some 1,000 participants, asking them to choose the news they wanted to read from a set of news brands; it also measured attitudes towards those brands both in and of themselves and in relation to other alternative news brands. In addition, participants’ party alignment was also measured.

This found some selective engagement with attitude-consistent news brands, but more strongly pointed to the role of pre-existing attitudes towards news brands; overall brand perception is thus more important than political alignment. To improve cross-cutting exposure, news brands should therefore seek to establish positive brand attitudes amongst all news consumers.