Negotiating News: How Cross-Cutting Romantic Partners Select, Consume, and Discuss News Together

ABSTRACT

As political partisanship intensifies, political similarity in romantic partnerships has become increasingly common. Still, there exist many for whom their romantic partnership is “cross-cutting,” or one in which partners hold dissimilar political beliefs, and for whom the selection, consumption, and discussion of news may be especially challenging. Drawing from literature on news exposure, co-viewing, and political talk, I consider the influence of cross-cutting romantic partnerships on if and how romantic partners select, consume, and discuss news with each other. Through in-depth interviews with individuals in cross-cutting romantic partnerships (N = 67), I find that cross-cutting couples experience two phenomena when navigating news: a) negotiated exposure, in which partners influence the news one another selects and consumes, and b) two-step conflict, in which news content, source, and volume spurred conflict, not only discussion, between partners. I consider the implications of these phenomena for the study of political polarization, news use, and political discussion, and advocate for these areas of research to consider relational contexts in their approach.

KEYWORDS:

• Cross-cutting
• political communication
• news
• polarization
• in-depth interviews

Acknowledgments

This work received support from the Institute for Humane Studies under grant no. IHS016699.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2023.2270445

Notes

1. The study received IRB approval (# 54708) on February 14, 2020.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Institute for Humane Studies, George Mason University [IHS016699].

Notes on contributors

Emily Van Duyn

Emily Van Duyn (PhD, The University of Texas at Austin) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research explores the contexts in which people receive information and talk (or do not talk) about politics.