A New Dataset and Field Experiment on Television News Consumption and Political Attitudes

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Does left- and right-leaning partisan media undermine democratic accountability and contribute to polarization? Could nudges to promote more balanced media diets stick and, in the long run, increase democratic accountability and reduce polarization? This project will investigate these questions using a novel dataset matching panel survey responses to TV viewership data and a randomized field experiment. This new dataset and research design will advance prior work by encouraging changes in media viewership and not relying on self-reported media consumption. Findings from this research will deepen the understanding of how citizens from across the ideological spectrum consume media and speak to the feasibility of a range of potential strategies to encourage citizens to form more balanced media habits. This will help catalyze the development of new interventions that could also be applied in the context of TV news, social media, and internet news.In this project, the PIs will conduct a randomized field experiment to investigate whether a temporary intervention can cause people to permanently broaden their media diets -- and whether this broader exposure increases political knowledge and decreases polarization. In the experiment, the PIs will incentivize current viewers of partisan media from across the ideological spectrum to consume substitute news for several weeks. The PIs will behaviorally track whether media consumption in the treatment group changes even after these incentives cease -- as citizens form new, lasting habits -- by using TV viewership data. To measure opinion change, the PIs will also conduct a series of panel surveys to measure both short- and long-term effects. Data from this project -- including the stimuli and the survey data matched to the TV viewership data -- will be made publicly available to promote future scholarship.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.