Outrageous and Contagious: How Partisan News Affects Social Interaction

• In Event: Media and Information Effects on Public Opinion

Abstract

Public opinion and its relation to media is a richly studied subfield, yet the interrelationship between “outrage media” and political behavior is little understood. Few surveys focus on cable news and talk radio, which has made it difficult to plumb the consequences of exposure to intense, argumentative media. Conventional wisdom holds that politics has gotten nastier and that both outrage media and social media are significantly to blame. At the same time, conventional wisdom also holds that people live in ideological bubbles, avoiding interaction with people whose views differ from their own. Testing which aspects of conventional wisdom hold water and teasing out the relationship between one’s media consumption habits and the tenor of one’s interactions with political opponents is difficult to do with existing data sources.

With this in mind, we use the 2018 CCES to compile data on respondents’ media diet, focusing on how they experience watching, listening, or reading cable news opinion shows, conventional newspapers, and talk radio. Our module further includes questions about one’s online and offline political interactions. Finally, we asked questions gauging emotions, attitudes, and manifested political activity.

At the broadest level, our goal is to determine if media consumption contributes to the coarseness of contemporary politics. If so, what types of media consumption enhance or intensify political dispositions?

To provide one example of the analyses in this project, we will investigate how attitudes of those who watch or listen to outrage media (in comparison to those with more conventional media engagement), manifest those attitudes in their own behavior on social media as well as in their offline political interactions. Drawing on research conducted by Facebook’s own staff, we hypothesize that conservatives are more likely to engage in acrimonious debate while liberals are more likely to withdraw by blocking or defriending. Our paper will examine how the pattern on fight or withdraw is related to media consumption and habits.

The data collection for this project is complete and data analysis will commence this spring. This paper is part of a larger project by the three authors that examines differences between liberals and conservatives in contemporary American life.

Authors

• Jeffrey M. Berry, Tufts University

• James M. Glaser, Tufts University

• Deborah Schildkraut, Tufts University