Is Journalistic Truth Dead? Measuring How Informed Voters Are about Political News

Abstract

To investigate general patterns in news information in the U.S., we combine a protocol for identifying major political news stories, 11 monthly surveys with 15,000 participants, and a model of news discernment. When confronted with a true and a fake news story, 47% of subjects confidently choose the true story, 3% confidently choose the fake story, and the remaining half are uncertain. Socioeconomic differences are associated with large variations in the probability of selecting the true news story. Partisan congruence between an individual and a news story matters too, but its impact is up to an order of magnitude smaller.

Keywords: media, inequalities, polarization, information

JEL Classification: L82, D72, D83, D90