Discussion

Most scholars agree that news exposure is normatively desirable. In this project, we aimed to provide a new perspective on the role of news media in society. We argued that tuning in to news can generate a wide range of adverse outcomes, polarizing attitudes, exacerbating out-party hostility, worsening perceptions of the political system, or making people more anxious or angry. We tested these potential pitfalls in concert with three beneficial outcomes, i.e., political knowledge, political participation, and support for inter-party compromise.

Across two experimental designs combining participants’ survey and behavioral browsing data in two distinct countries, prolonged decreases or increases in news consumption had no effects on the positive or negative individual-level outcomes. Two exceptions to this null pattern emerged: increasing news intake made the Polish participants feel warmer toward the out-party and decreasing news use led the American participants to see the system as less polarized. Because these effects are not very robust, we caution against putting too much weight on these results. These largely null patterns did not depend on whether people more clearly complied with the treatments, assessed using self-reported as well as behavioral measures based on online traces, and also accounting for whether participants visited hard news and/or saw political content outside news during the treatment. Similarly, although we used both self-reported and behavioral indicators of prior levels of news consumption and its ideological congeniality, news effects did not depend on an individual’s typical news diet. That is, the decrease in news use was not less impactful for avid news consumers or the increase in news use did not affect those rarely exposed to the news. The one exception—those whose prior news diet was ideologically congenial became less knowledgeable about current events when consuming more news – is small in magnitude. Testing our hypotheses in two distinct contexts assures that the results are not due to idiosyncrasies of any particular media or party system alone.

Although we offer a comprehensive examination of various individual-level effects of news exposure, these null effects are not precise estimates of population average treatment effects because our samples are not perfect cross-sections of the populations. This limitation is common to most work relying on data from online samples willing to share their behavioral traces, in that no such work can claim representativeness. More importantly, we note a few considerations regarding compliance. Our participants complied with the experimental treatments, apart from the subjects in Poland who did not self-report greater news consumption (perhaps due to the aforementioned biases in self-reports). These shifts, however, were small in magnitude, as indicated in the variations in behaviorally tracked exposures to online news and in the US subjects’ self-reports of overall news diet on the post-survey. There are no established theoretical and empirical benchmarks for determining when exactly news exposure should influence individual attitudes, cognitions, or behaviors, and how large the shifts in exposure need to be to notice these effects. Research that systematically varies the amounts of news in people’s media diets is needed to identify such minimal thresholds. In our project, the detected increases or decreases were likely insufficient to generate noticeable impacts on the tested outcomes.

In addition, the participants were instructed to increase or decrease their news consumption overall, not only online. While our trace data can ascertain desktop visits to (congenial) news websites for behavioral compliance and prior exposure measures, parallel behavioral indicators of these exposures on mobile and offline are missing. For most people, television remains the dominant news source (Allen et al., 2020) and we do not have behavioral data on these exposures occurring offline. Again, the self-reported measures that did ask about news use across devices and modalities (e.g., television, radio, mobile, social media, and so forth) have known limitations, and so the totality of changes in news exposures cannot be reliably determined. If the participants did not comply with our treatments on sources from which we could not collect behavioral data and did not accurately report compliance, the effects of the detected changes in online news consumption may have been minimized, leading to the null effects observed.

In a similar vein, although we do account for visits to social media pages of news organizations on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, we cannot get at news people encounter elsewhere on social media (e.g., friends’ posts, headlines, or embedded news videos). Instead, we capture a more direct engagement with news (i.e., landing on the URL of a news domain or a social media news page). It is thus possible that No News study participants nevertheless encountered news inadvertently when going to social media for other purposes. These encounters may have counteracted the effects of the US participants avoiding news in other contexts. At the same time, we note that most people do not come across news and public affairs information on social media platforms. Online behavioral data suggest that only 4% of News Feed on Facebook are news (Zuckerberg, 2018) and public affairs comprise 1.8% of the average News Feed of college students (Wells and Thorson, 2017, see also Karnowski et al., 2017; Vermeer et al., 2020). In our data, although social media browsing from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube made up 7.7% of all visits during the overall study in the US and Poland, only 0.4% of those visits were to the identified news organizations, and these made up only 1.2% of all news visits overall. It is thus unlikely that social media exposure to the news would bias our effects in any meaningful way. That said, exposure to political memes or friends’ posts about current events also carries political information that can have effects above and beyond any news exposure, as we also note below. In order to test the prevalence and the effects of such encounters with politics, scholars should dedicate (and ideally pull) resources to developing tracking and data donation tools that work across devices and platforms.

Furthermore, (news) media effects depend on a host of factors, and various personal, content- or medium-level characteristics likely moderate the effects. Our pre-registered models accounted for prior levels of news exposure and our exploratory analyses additionally tested education and ideology as moderators, yet other socio-demographics (Yang and Grabe, 2011), the medium itself (e.g., newspapers, television, or internet; Althaus and Tewksbury, 2002), different digital outlets (e.g., online news sites, blogs, or online video sites, Dimitrova et al., 2014), and/or the mode of consumption (e.g., on apps or mobile Ohme, 2020) may also matter to whether, when, and for whom (news) media exposure has effects. Instead, our approach incentivized shifts in news consumption across devices, outlets, and modalities, potentially obscuring some nuances and contingencies.

These considerations aside, our results challenge the popular narrative that news media contribute to a healthy citizenry. These results also counter our expectations that news use should have a range of adverse effects. We speculate about three reasons for these patterns. In the current polarized climate in many countries, when citizens’ political identities are constantly activated (Settle, 2018) and when numerous ostensibly non-political issues and events become associated with politics (DellaPosta, 2020), it may be increasingly difficult to shift individual opinions and beliefs. Feelings toward out-groups, political elites, and the system at large may be too deeply ingrained in citizens’ overarching social and political identities (Mason, 2018) to be noticeably affected by (again minor) increases or decreases in one’s news consumption.

Second, despite the long-standing theoretical centrality of news, sizable proportions of the American and international public see news as complex or boring, are averse to partisan politics (Klar et al., 2018), and avoid news (Newman, 2019). As such, news accounts for only a small part of citizens’ overall information and communication ecology and is overshadowed by sports, entertainment, socializing, among other content categories that are not related to politics. Online, only between 2% (Wojcieszak et al., 2021) and 7–9% (Guess et al., 2021) of all URLs visited by large samples of Americans are news domains (Stier et al., 2022), and news comprised around 14% of total daily media diets when additionally accounting for mobile and television (Allen et al., 2020). In our trace data, visits to news sites comprised 3.01% of the overall browsing. Given that citizens’ time and attention are not consumed by current affairs and their attitudes, cognitions, and behaviors are also shaped by other factors (e.g., family, community context), whatever shifts in the very low baselines would have to be massive in strength or duration and/or small increases in news use would have to have a massive influence on the tested outcomes.

Third, today’s hybrid media environment may require a reconsideration of what is news, how to define and measure it, and how to identify the sources, contents, or textual and visual messages that can be considered news (or at least fulfill the democratic role of news). Our project did not define news consumption for the participants and—when measuring it behaviorally—narrowly focused on domain-level conceptualization (e.g., visiting cnn.com or foxnews.com). However, news sites feature not only hard news but also non-political content, so users may indeed visit “news" domains but only to read about sports, weather, or food recipes, not about politics. Others, in contrast, may visit political websites, not on our list (e.g., blogs) and/or go to ostensibly non-political outlets to read about politics (e.g., an article about abortion in Women’s Health), and learn about public affairs from such sources and contents. In our exploratory analyses relying on the classification of titles as related to politics, we accounted for the fact that citizens may conceptualize news in different ways and see each of the above scenarios as ”news” exposure. Yet even after accounting for these political contents within and outside news domains, the null effects remained unchanged. Nevertheless, myriad other sources and media messages may be seen as news or having news value by audiences (e.g., a celebrity tweeting about the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade abortion; see Edgerly, 2017; Edgerly and Vraga, 2019 for key evidence). To the extent that these distinct outlooks on what is news shape what sources audiences use, how they process information, and what they learn, scholars may need to expand their understanding and definitions when theorizing and studying news use and its democratic effects, positive and adverse.

Naturally, news media are important. They keep other powers in check by investigating and publicizing the truth and bind citizens together around shared events, values, or concerns (Dayan and Katz, 1992; Delli Carpini and Keeter, 1996; de Tocqueville, 2000), a function that is proving increasingly difficult in the fragmented media environment. In fact, much democratic theorizing concerns these macro-level effects of news media on society and democracy at large, effects that are challenging to study using social scientific methods. In addition, news media may play a paramount role in the gradual development of attitudes and participatory habits during political socialization (Moeller and de Vreese, 2019) and have a cumulative influence on people’s perceptions of (political) reality over the years (Gerbner, 1998), subtle effects that can only be tested with longitudinal designs that collect data over much longer periods. Nevertheless, this project, the first to rely on incentivized over-time designs in naturalistic settings and using both self-reported and online behavioral indicators of general news exposure across two countries, suggests that direct individual-level contributions of news media may be more limited than typically hoped or assumed.