Media habits and political polarization in the U.S.

For my last year in engineering school, we had to do a personal work about one non-scientific subject. I chose to cover the 2016 POTUS Election. I think I can share it with you now, as not a lot of people outside of my school read it. The first part was about the political polarization in the States. It sums up a quite long article written by PEW Research Center. Here it is :

In America today, it is virtually impossible to live in an ideological bubble.

The high number of available media in the US makes it almost impossible to only get news from just one source. But, depending on their political orientation, it appears that people tend to prefer some media to other ones. I wanted to show the main media habits depending on the liberal or conservative views of the American people.

Let’s start with the conservatives. Consistent conservatives are clustered around a single news source, Fox News, which 88% of them trust. This high pro-portion is interesting, considering that more than half of the people in this group distrust at least 24 of the 36 mainstream media sources. On social media, let’s take Facebook, conservatives are the more likely to read only political opinions in line with their own views. This might be linked to the fact that two thirds of the average conservative’s friends are also conservatives. (Even though they only account for 26% of the population)

Consistent liberals show more trust in the mainstream media. More than half of them trust at least 28 of the 36 media sources. The main ones they trust are CNN, MSNBC, NPR and NYT. We can see here that they are not clustered around one main source as the conservatives are. On social media like Facebook and Twitter, they are the more likely to follow issue-based group and to join polit-ically involved groups. It’s good to note that 81% of them do not trust Fox News.

There is only one source trusted by at least half of the people in each of the five groups, and it’s TWSJ. Five other sources are trusted by 4 out of the 5 groups, they are The Economist, BBC, ABC, USA Today and Google news.

About the power of Facebook, in 2014 it was the second government and political online news provider in the US, second only to local TV websites. Indeed, 48% of web users (who make up 89% of the US population) got political news from Facebook, while 49% of them did so from local TV websites. It is quite safe to suppose that now Facebook is the leading political online news provider in the US)

When they are asked to name the three people with whom they talk the most about politics, 94% of consistent conservatives give the name of at least one other conservative, while 76% of consistent liberals do so with another liberal.

An interesting fact is that internet does not shift the political ground. Actually, internet users are nearly indistinguishable from all adults in their media consumer habits.

Source : PEW RESEARCH CENTER, Political Polarization and Media Habits [ Online ]. 2014. Available following : http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-media-habits/