Does the Internet expose ordinary users to a greater or lesser diversity of political news and opinion, compared with

old media?

Introduction Democracy and mediated communication have been intrinsically linked for centuries. The introduction of the printing press to Western Europe, for example, facilitated increasing literacy and the wider spread of ideas, eventually fostering the development of newspapers, which remain integral to the democratic process today. Newer entries to the media landscape, including the radio and the television, have similarly entered into the domain of democratic debate. Whilst routinely accused of bias, corruption, hypocrisy and many other ills, these forms of media have indisputably contributed to the functioning of democratic society, through spreading political information, scrutinising public officials and coalescing public opinion around one or more of the finite set of choices that are the basis of democratic elections. These primary forms of old media have therefore been dubbed the public sphere, the conceptual descendent of the agora, the physical centre of deliberative democracy in Ancient Greek city-states. As a new form of mediated communication, the Internet clearly shares many of its characteristics with older forms of media: it has been adopted en masse in liberal democracies around the world, and permits the rapid dissemination of political news and opinion. But there are also many fundamental differences between the Internet and old media. Consciously designed as a decentralised network, the Internet lacks the inherently hierarchical structure of other media. Moreover, the technological limitations on data transmission are exponentially lower than the frequency spectrums of TV and radio. As a result, the Internet can accommodate many orders of magnitude more inputs, and hence participants, in conversation. This paper explores the significance of this structural difference between the Internet and old media on the shape and form of the public sphere and hence the conduct of deliberative democracy. It focuses on one very important metric: the extent to which Internet users are exposed to a diversity of political news and opinion, compared with old media. As will be shown, this measure of diversity has considerable consequences for the successful working of the public sphere. As such, this study ultimately serves to provide a contribution to understanding about how the Internet impacts upon democratic society. The paper begins by exploring a range of theoretical perspectives and predictions about the consequences for democracy of increasing the number of channels in a media landscape. The discussion then turns to empirical evidence, finding some evidence of ideological segregation in online communication platforms like the blogosphere and Twitter, and showing how an abundance of choice has made it possible for citizens uninterested in political news and opinion to avoid it altogether. The paper concludes by arguing that, in spite of many studies suggesting that the Internet limits peoples exposure to a diversity of content, this evidence is largely circumstantial and provisional. The Internet may be reconfigured over time to promote rather than prevent exposure to diverse news and opinion.

Theoretical perspectives Before turning to the Internet itself, the discussion may benefit from theoretical perspectives on diversity in the news media. Taking as their example a simple hypothetical newspaper market, the economists Mullainathan and Shleifer (2005) model the effect of greater competition through the proliferation of additional newspapers (or more generically, for the purposes of this paper, channels), on the bias or slant of the news reporting. Through their model the authors find that as more channels are introduced, the enhanced competition leads individual titles to target readers and their prior prejudices more aggressively and more extremely. Thus, if additional channels divide the market along ideological lines, we expect them to become more biased than they were in the regime of moderate competition (p.1039). A similar model by Stone (2010) finds that, for a priori biased readers, a media monopoly would be preferable to a duopoly. This is because, in order to maximise market share, a monopolist would likely hire a moderate reporter, whereas duopolists would differentiate to attract the more extreme consumers (p.3), thus skewing the reporting in an ideologically appealing direction, and reinforcing prior prejudices. Stones model echoes that of Mullainathan and Shleifer in providing theoretical support for the idea that increased competition through the entry into the market of additional channels will result in ideologically skewed news reporting. Campante and Hojman (2010) take this argument a step further and test this logic against empirical data. They note a reduction in ideological polarization in America between the 1930s and the 1960s, coinciding with the introduction and rapid mass adoption of the radio and then the television. Crucially, they argue that, because these new forms of media had low variety there were initially very few TV channels, and radio content was homogenized by the networkization of local radio after 1930 their emergence can help to explain the decreased polarization during the period. Campante and Hojmans analysis is especially useful in highlighting that the particular form and structure of different media is closely related to ideological polarization, which they link in turn to a number of other consequences, including decreased turnout. This speaks to the significance of the present analysis in determining the relative diversity of content that Internet users are exposed to, suggesting that if a medium like the Internet offers many more channels and much more variety than old media, political polarization may result. This notion has been explored at length by a number of writers, many of whom wrote before empirical data became very accessible or abundant. For example, Nicholas Negroponte introduced the concept of the Daily Me in his 1995 book Being Digital, suggesting that future technologies would permit a newspaper constructed purely around a users personal interests. The political significance of this idea was taken up by Cass Sunstein in Republic.com (2002) and its follow-up Republic.com 2.0 (2007). Sunstein argued that Negropontes Daily Me model could inhibit two vital elements of deliberative democracy: that people should be exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance and that citizens should have a range of common experiences (p.5). In defence of his argument, Sunstein looks back to the framers of the American constitution, claiming that for them, heterogeneity [was] a creative force, improving deliberation and producing better outcomes (p.35). Neither is this a

challenge that applies solely to America. As Elihu Katz noted in the context of Israeli broadcasting, after the introduction of a second television channel, segmentation seems to be fast displacing national comings-together (1996, p.25). Sunsteins premise has been echoed by a number of prominent intellectuals. Jurgen Habermas (2006) has disregarded the potential for a reinvigorated public sphere online, citing the fragmentation into a huge number of isolated issue publics that the Internet has engendered, interestingly noting that only the focal points of the quality press can provide a suitably firm foundation for political communication (p.423). Moreover, commentators David Brooks and Thomas Friedman have respectively cited information cocoons and political echo chambers as adversely affecting democratic decision-making (Brooks 2010; Friedman 2009). These perspectives are persuasive, but they remain at the level of the theoretical and the predictive. In the following sections, this paper seeks to assess these arguments in light of a wide range of empirical studies regarding the exposure to a diversity of political news and opinion online. Exposure to alternative opinions on the Internet A number of studies have tackled the question of diversity on the Internet compared with old media directly, by looking at data captured from across various forms of media. A prominent example of such a study is that from Gentzkow and Shapiro (2011), who collected usage and survey data on a range of Internet news websites of various ideological slants, as well as broadcast TV news, cable TV news, magazines and local and national newspapers, and various real-life social relationships. Constructing from the data an isolation index to detail the ideological disparity of content that American conservatives and liberals are respectively exposed to, the authors estimate that the Internet is high, though not the highest, in their list of segregated media forms. It falls above both forms of television, and local newspapers and magazines, but below national newspapers, which are calculated to be the most ideologically segregated medium covered. Crucially, though, if the Internet were removed from the media landscape, this would reduce the ideological segregation of news and opinion consumption across all media (p.1801). Gentzkow and Shapiro find, then, that Internet users are more ideologically divided in what they see than most forms of old media, such as television news. This seems a relatively straightforward answer to the question this essay seeks to address. There are, however, a number of caveats associated with these findings. Firstly, Internet news was found to be relatively less ideologically segregated than national newspapers, as has already been noted, but also lower than every form of face-to-face interaction, including with families, colleagues and other acquaintances. Secondly, the segregation is surprisingly low in an absolute sense, with the authors describing online news as far from perfectly segregated (p.1801). Indeed, the study shows that a user who read news only on foxnews.com, far from typifying the consumption habits of the red half of America, would actually have a more conservative news diet than 99% of Internet news users (p.1801). Thirdly, looking back over six years to 2004, the study finds no evidence that the Internet is becoming segregated over time (p.1799), offering no cause for greater pessimism about the future. Finally, a study by Stroud (2010), using survey data, compared the correlation between ideology

and forms of media, merely found that a more general cross-outlet pattern (p.360) with no single media form standing out as being radically more ideologically divisive. As such, the evidence found from these empirical studies for clear ideological segregation online is ambiguous at best. Explaining the limitations of this effect, Gentzkow and Shapiro claim that most online news consumption is concentrated in a small number of relatively centrist sites (p.1801), such as Yahoo! News and cnn.com. Thus whilst the most extreme Internet sites are far more polarized than any source offline (p.1813), these account for a very small share of online consumption (p.1802). Perhaps the echo chamber narrative arose, then, because of an undue and misguided focus on the most ideologically extreme sections of the Internet. However, whilst readers of more extreme websites are relatively small in number, they may nonetheless wield a disproportional influence on wider political discourse. In their study of how different online news entities filter stories, Baum and Groeling (2008) showed that sites with a more defined and extreme ideological bias, such as dailykos.com and freerepublic.com, were more likely to feature stories from newswires that reflected and reinforced their particular bias. In their concluding remarks, Baum and Groeling cite survey data showing that compared with other Internet users, readers of political blogs like The Daily Kos and Free Republic are, firstly, more predisposed to prefer self-reinforcing news, and secondly, more likely to discuss politics with other people. Thus their significance to broader patterns of public opinion, and hence American politics, in all likelihood exceeds their raw numbers (p.360). This finding therefore provide an important counterweight to Gentzkow and Shapiros (2011) notion that ideologically extreme sites play only a negligible role in the online political ecosystem. Baum and Groeling also emphasise the importance of a particular type of website: blogs. Blogging became a popular platform for political writing as content management systems became more accessible in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Blogs about politics are some of the most popular in the genre (Hargattai et al 2008) and many inspire loyal audiences. They have also frequently had direct impact on the political system: blogs contributed to the fall of Senator Trent Lott, for example (Drezner and Farrell 2008). Given that blog readers are more likely than other Internet users to shape political debate (Baum and Groeling 2008) and more likely to participate in politics more generally (Lawrence, Sides and Farrell 2010), the blogosphere may provide persuasive evidence of the echo chamber phenomenon theorised by Sunstein (2002; 2007) and others. Perhaps blogs are the most appropriate analogy to the huge number of isolated issue publics that Habermas (2006) claims the Internet engenders. In assessing this claim, the web gives us an important research tool: the hyperlink, which allows authors of posts to link to other web pages. Hyperlinks provide a perfect proxy for testing Habermass claim of isolation online: if blogs exist as isolated echo chambers, devoid of diversity, we would expect to see either minimal use of hyperlinks overall, or see them used only to point readers to purely like-minded sources. A number of studies have taken this approach to measuring exposure to diverse opinion in blogs. Adamic and Glance (2005) used the 2004 US presidential election as a context for an analysis of more than a thousand political blogs. They

investigated hyperlinks in two contexts: links to other blogs in the text of blog posts, and the more static set of links, called a blogroll, that feature as endorsements of other blogs. Overall, the study found an unmistakeable division between the conservative and liberal political blogospheres, (p.4) with fully 91% of links remaining inside the ideological community. As such this study demonstrates a clear polarization between left-wing and right-wing spheres of American political discourse, suggesting that the typical political blog does not ordinarily expose its readers to a diverse or opposing viewpoints. It is important to bear in mind, however, that Adamic and Glances approach involved rather crudely classifying the political blogs as liberal or conservative prior to the analysis. Even within the stringently two-party American political system, and let alone in multi-party systems elsewhere, the diversity within these spheres should not be discounted. A link from one conservative blog to another necessarily entails a different voice. Diversity of opinion may not be defined simply at the macro level of partisan disagreement, but perhaps also at the micro level of subtly different experiences and perspectives. Far from Habermass notion of a huge number of isolated issue publics, Adamic and Glance actually show substantial uniformity amongst two very sizeable groups. Moreover, even if 91% of links on political blogs link to like-minded sources, this of course means that 9% link to the other side of the aisle. How many of such links are genuinely positive engagements with an argument and how many are merely examples of straw man rhetorical devices was investigated by Hargittai et al (2008), who used content analysis as well as link structures for a more incisive methodological approach. For their own sample of forty popular blogs, the authors found a slightly higher proportion of links across the ideological divide than did Adamic and Glance, with 12% of links from conservative blog links pointing to liberal blog posts, and 16% in the other direction (p.78). Hargittai et al construct a typology of these cross-ideological links. Overall, the use of such linking for straw man arguments which do not contribute to a substantive discussion of political issues accounted for a plurality of the links, whilst substantive discussion, including actual agreement amongst ideologically opposed bloggers, constituted between a fifth and a quarter of such links (p.84). Whilst hardly a ringing endorsement of the potential for deliberative democracy online, Hargittai et al nonetheless demonstrate at least some evidence of substantive engagement between representatives of different ideologies. Thus far the analysis has assumed, in line with the hierarchy associated with older forms of media, a clear distinction between authors and writers. In the case of both traditional news organisations online and leading blogs, this assumption made sense. News organisations employ professional journalists and rely on their brand as a stamp of quality, whilst political blogs exhibit a highly skewed readership distribution has created a new elite set of bloggers (Drezner and Farrell 2004). Moreover, blogs are typically structured to facilitate two layers of contribution: the original post taking pride of place, with space for comments below. It was important to consider, therefore, the difference between speaking and being heard as Hindman phrases it (2009, p16). Yet whilst the question assumes a certain passivity and mono-directionality in asking

how much the Internet exposes users to diverse news and opinion, as the Internet has evolved it has facilitated more and more interactive uses amongst ordinary people: witness the proliferation of social networks and collaborative encyclopaedias in recent years, collectively referred to as web 2.0. More recent studies reflect this shift, and have begun to treat ordinary users as participants in the creation of political news and opinion online. The distinction between readers and writers has in many ways become blurred, and any analysis of the exposure of people to diverse content should recognise the participatory role that many users are playing. This trend is broad into sharpest relief by looking at Twitter, a microblogging site that obliterates the traditional distinction between writer and reader, post and comment. All tweets are created equal, with the strict 140 character limit and the unadulterated, chronological order of in which they appear helping to level the playing field between traditional elites and ordinary users. As a result of its structure, precisely defining what Twitter is and what primary function it serves is a matter of some debate, neatly summarised by the title of Kwak et als 2010 paper What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media?. What is clear, however, is that a decent proportion of Twitter content pertains to news and politics: Kwak et al claim that over 85% of topics are headline or persistent news in nature (p.1), and there has been considerable uptake of Twitter amongst old media elites, especially journalists. Of course, involving more people as not just readers but creators does not guarantee exposure to more diverse content. Indeed, the very notion of an echo chamber implies the expression of opinion in the first place, and writers such as Eli Pariser (2012) have taken Cass Sunsteins original thesis further by arguing that the filtering algorithms that reduce exposure to alternative viewpoints are powered by user input. User interactivity could therefore result in less, not more, exposure to diverse news and opinion. In a study, Conover et al (2011) isolated a quarter of a million politically relevant tweets and constructed two networks that represented two means of interaction on Twitter: retweets, where user A rebroadcasts user Bs message to her own followers verbatim, and mentions where user A references user B in a new tweet. The study found that the retweet network structure reflects the patterns of separation seen for news websites and blogs described above, but the mention network does not exhibit this kind of political segregation, resulting in users being exposed to individuals and information they would not have been likely to choose in advance (p.1). In their explanation of this discrepancy, the authors suggest that it is the politically calculated use of hashtags, the use of which emerged to categorise or label a tweets content, which attracts the attention of ideologically opposed users. For example, the hashtag tcot (top conservatives on Twitter) is typically used by and for conservative users, but could be hijacked by liberal users looking for wider political exposure. As a result, users affronted by such seemingly erroneous usage (itself a rather dubious view, given that nobody owns or even operates hashtags) would not retweet an opposing view, which might imply endorsement, but would instead respond to the user by mentioning them. Conover et al are however pessimistic about this cross-ideological usage, arguing that the absence of facts and the extreme nature of views expressed is more likely to exacerbate than soften polarization. In addition, the authors fail to note a quirk on the

Twitter network such that when one user directly responds another user in a tweet, starting the post with the users name, the tweet will only be broadcast to followers of both users. Given the ideological segregation Conover et al describe, it seems unlikely that too many users follow users on both sides of the political divide. Nonetheless, the phenomenon that Conover et al observe is evidence of at least some exposure of users to more diverse views, and suggests that the structure of a web service (and how users are able to manipulate this structure, as with the cynical use of opposition hashtags), is crucial to this exposure. In their 2011 study, Feller et al looked at German political tweeters and found that Twitter replicates the structures in news websites and blogs described above. Birds of a feather appear to flock together: by looking at mentions of particular parties and the network of users following one another, the study found that for four of the five parties studied, there are many more connections between users in favour of a particular party than between users favouring opposing parties (p.476). Interestingly, this network structure also reflected more nuanced ideological factors: the parties that were ideologically closer also appeared slightly socially closer on the network. This study of a multi-party system, based on proportional representation, is therefore valuable in drawing out some of the nuances that might be missed in the binary, majoritarian American electoral system. In addition, the study found that the majority of topics are discussed by a diverse group of microbloggers (p.1), albeit with some variance in levels of discussion between party supporters on specific topics. Studying discourse on Twitter has thus added more nuance to the question over to what extent the Internet exposes its users to diverse news and opinion. The analysis has shown that design decisions taken for particular platforms may affect the level of exposure that users experience. Clearly, whatever facet of the Internet is being studied, the question is not a straightforward one to answer. There is another complicating factor: not all Internet users are the same. This has already been noted in the context of niche blog readership, which tends to involve users more interested in politics than the average. It therefore follows that there must also be users less interested in politics. A great many users do not avail themselves of much political news or opinion online, be it through news websites, blogs or Twitter. Exposure to political news on the Internet Whilst it is neither surprising nor undesirable that the members of pluralistic societies have diverse and varied interests, the increasing amount of time being spent online may presage new concerns about the exposure of the public to politics. These concerns pertain to the structural differences between the Internet and old media. The following passage from Campante and Hojman (2010) illustrates this more clearly: In practice, individuals choose the mix of media they consume. In principle, each media outlet in a given media market can be conceived as a bundle that offers entertainment, information, and ideological content (p.8). The authors theoretical idea here of a bundle of varied content provides a useful lens through which to see how the Internet differs from other media. Considering its technical capacity for greater interactivity and personalisation, and its comparative

freedom from state regulation and oversight, the Internet is relatively unbundled compared to old media. As Tewksbury (2005) explains, the Internet is an environment particularly conducive to outlet specialization (p.333). As such, not merely the ideological slant of the content that users are exposed to, but the very exposure to political content of any kind is an important point to consider. Prior (2005) argues this case forcefully, comparing the Internet to network television. Most prominent TV channels around the world are obliged, either through regulations or norms, to broadcast news bulletins as part of their daily schedules. Given that, prior to the arrival of digital television, most TV platforms were limited to only a few channels, viewers were often faced with the choice of watching news content or turning off the TV. A typical TV channels schedule might therefore include a wide range of content, including entertainment, news and factual programming. This highly inclusive approach is perhaps most famously represented in the BBCs charter, which to this day states the corporations mission is to inform, educate and entertain. Prior (2007) uses the Low-Choice/High-Choice experiment to illustrate the effect of these changes in choice. Survey participants were divided into two groups, both of which were asked for their viewing preferences in hypothetical situations. One group was offered a typical network TV early evening offering, consisting of purely news programmes, whilst the other also had the option of several entertainment programmes instead. In the news-only group, 80% of viewers chose a news programme rather than turn off the TV, whereas of the other group, only 35% of viewers chose news, with a majority instead choosing an entertainment option. Further evidence of this phenomenon comes from Elihu Katz, who explains how, after the introduction of a second TV channel in Israel in the early 1990s, the audiences for both channels nightly news programmes combined were lower than the audience for the news programme in the single-channel environment. Katz suggests that the most likely explanation is that the choice between two news programmes raised the possibility of a third choice: not to view either (1996, p.31). These experiments shows the huge transformative effect of a greater proliferation of choice, particularly when this choice varies by type: the audience is thus segmented into those who would watch news anyway, and those who, given more freedom to choose, prefer entertainment options. Newspapers are also an interesting point of comparison. A typical daily newspaper might include news, lifestyle, business and sport sections. The prominence of news stories, usually placed literally front and centre, demonstrate the centrality of political coverage and its exposure to ordinary people that this structure engenders. Yet given the much more effective filtering facility on the Internet, one might reasonably expect exposure to be lower. Whilst news sites certainly continue to be popular, there is no single front page of the Internet, and user choice plays a far greater role in dictating what users see, whether through search engines or app stores. As such, many people will take advantage of greater choice and tune out of politics completely (Prior p.587). Ultimately then, as Dahlgren notes, the use of the Net for political purposes is clearly minor compared with other purposes to which it is put (2005 p.151). A survey conducted by Horrigan at el (2005) for the Pew Internet & American Life Project implicitly supports this thesis. Taken in the context of the 2004 presidential election, the researchers suggest that respondents fell into one of four types of

exposure. They labelled the groups omnivores, selective reinforcers, tuned outs and contrarians. Notably, they described the tuned out group, which made up 21% of the population with stated preferences on a candidate, as not express[ing] great interest in the campaign, and [they] are not news hounds (p.iv). The tuned out group is not a proportionally large one, but it nonetheless represents a significant minority of people who take little interest in politics and for whom the Internet may represent an opportunity to avoid it. Considering that the survey was taken in the context of a heated American election, it may even understate the size of the tuned out group for whom news is not the preferred type of content. As Prior concludes, it is possible to be both optimistic and pessimistic about the Internets potential to transform democratic debate. On the one hand, those who want it now have a much greater wealth of political content at their fingertips, from DC gossip sites to in-depth policy analysis. However, those with a preference for entertainment, once they gain access to new media, become less knowledgeable about politics and less likely to vote (p.587). The fact that a reduced exposure to politics can even lower turnout rates demonstrates how much this phenomenon threatens to affect even the most basic tenets of representative democracy. Conclusion: the future of political news and opinion online Most of the evidence in this paper has presented a rather gloomy picture, suggesting that overall the Internet fails to expose users to a diversity of political news and opinion. Between ideologically segregated political communication platforms and the plethora of entertainment options the Internet offers, it seems that people will be able to live in a cocoon of self-reinforcing media (Chaffee and Metzger 2009, p.376) leading to more fragmented, atomised societies. Yet it would be very naive to assume that this characterisation is fixed and permanent. One need only note that the Internet in 1999 (before blogs) and in 2005 (before Twitter) was different to how it is today to realise the potential for new Internet-based communication platforms to once again disrupt the landscape. The core difference between the Internet and older forms of media, then, is that the Internet is able to accommodate new platforms, with new patterns and norms of use, thus containing scope for a change in the publics level of exposure to alternative viewpoints. This is something that Cass Sunstein himself recognised in Republic.com 2.0 (2007). Sunstein theorised about the creation of a new platform which would be the polar opposite of an echo chamber: a place for rational deliberation about a wide range of political issues. As ever, the design of such a site would be crucial, with Sunstein suggesting it might be constructed to encourage norms of civility (p.193). While no website quite like this has yet caught the publics imagination en masse, there are clearly precedents for constructive, consensus-driven projects online, most notably the collaborative encyclopaedia Wikipedia, built with the help of a multitude of contributors. A Wikipedia for opinion might thus represent a constructive approach towards a healthier democratic discourse online. Whatever the outcome of such projects, the most important conclusion to be made is that the Internet has much more communicative and interactive capacity than any of the forms of old media considered here. As Sunstein noted, the Internet is hardly an enemy here. It holds out far more promise than risk (p.222). Despite its inauspicious

start, characterised by tendencies toward segregation and distraction, the mass adoption of the Internet and the maintenance of a healthy democracy are by no means mutually exclusive propositions. References
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