Selective Exposure and Trust in News

In the United States, Democrats and Republicans tend to consume different types of news, as partisans are more likely to seek out information that supports their party. This paper seeks to better understand why people tend to consume more co-partisan news. In particular, we consider two main types of explanations: people believe that co-partisan sources are more accurate and instrumentally value them more, and people have a preference to read co-partisan sources for reasons besides their instrumental value. To disentangle these hypotheses, we run an experiment in which people choose news sources when they are asked to make predictions about a salient political event, and we vary the incentives they have for making accurate predictions. When incentives increase, people may turn to sources they expect to be more instrumentally valuable, and potentially away from sources they consume for other reasons. We test this effect using real news sources like Fox News and CNN, as well as using artificially-constructed sources that exogenously vary in accuracy and slant. To isolate the channel that accuracy of news-source predictions play, we both analyze behavior when they use news sources to improve their own prediction, as well as when news sources make predictions for them.