The Role of News Brands and Leads in Exposure to Political Information on the Internet

Abstract

Today, the internet serves a wealth of news sources that encourages selective exposure to attitude-consistent and likeminded information. Several cues have been proposed to influence selective exposure, including partisanship, familiarity, and differential framing techniques. This study investigates the effects of news brand partisanship and news lead partisanship on selective exposure behaviors to internet news stories. With online news, it is possible that news brands believed to have a particular partisan bias may feature stories with an opposite partisan bias. This paper asks which of the two tested selective exposure cues used in this study participants respond to in an online news search environment. Using a non-college adult sample of 382 participants, this study confirms that selective exposure behavior is robust in a simulated news search environment and that news brand partisanship is a more powerful predictor of exposure than is news lead partisanship. The study finds, however, that the news brand effect on selective exposure is diminished when the news brand partisanship and news lead conflict with one another. The implications of the findings are discussed, and future directions for research are proposed.

Keywords::

• Internet
• journalism
• partisanship
• selective exposure

Notes

1. See Hayes (2008) for a more complete discussion of US political parties, issue ownership, and journalism.

2. Fox News Latino launched in 2010 and shut down at the end of 2016 (The Washington Times, December 8, 2016). In 2017, Fox News Latino’s website redirects to a page listing Latino-related content from across Fox News’ websites.