Does Listening to Trustworthy News Affect Political Knowledge and Behavior?

• In Event: News Avoidance and Incidental Exposure

Abstract

Despite the increasing popularity of podcasts as a source of news for many Americans, little is known about their precise role in the information ecosystem. We conduct an online field experiment that exa mines how consumption of trustworthy news via daily podcasts affects attitudes about politics and the media over a two-week period. Our treatment, deployed at the end of the first of two survey waves, asks subjects to subscribe to a specific high-quality daily news podcast, NPR's "Up First." In addition, treated subjects are asked to turn on mobile push notifications for the podcast. Randomization ensures that we can observe the causal effects of an exogenous change in respondents' news intake, which we measure by short quizzes sent via text message. We hypothesize that our treatment will (1) increase political knowledge, (2) alter news consumption habits after the intervention period, (3) increase overall media trust, and (4) reduce affective and perceived polarization, relative to a pure control group. Our results shed light on outcomes linked to the unique possibilities of this medium and, more broadly, on the malleability of mobile-first news consumers' information diets.

Authors

• Andy Guess, Princeton University

• Pablo Barbera, Computational Social Science, Meta

• Simon Munzert, Humboldt University of Berlin

• JungHwan Yang