LSC doctoral candidate Sara Yeo presented a paper at the American Political Science Association pre-conference in Chicago on August 28th. The study, “Information seeking in an age of (un)reliable information,” explored the conditions under which individuals are likely to select partisan media outlets.
Yeo and co-authors, LSC professors Dominique Brossard and Dietram Scheufele, as well as Communication Arts professor Michael Xenos, conducted an online experiment in which they exposed respondents to news articles with or without clear ideological cues.
They found that conservative respondents were more likely to shy away from MSNBC when they read a news article that lacked clear partisan cues. Additionally, conservatives were also more likely to select Fox News when partisan cues were absent.
Their work is currently under review in the ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.