Article-level Slant and Polarization of News Consumption on Social Media

Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, Ro'ee Levy, Markus Mobius, Jacob Steinhardt and Ruiqi Zhong

No 19807, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: We fine-tune a large language model on expert ratings to construct a content-based, article-level measure of news slant, applied to the near universe of articles (∼1 million) published online by the top ∼100 U.S. outlets in 2019. 70% of the variation in slant occurs within rather than across outlets, leaving wide scope for within-outlet ideological selection. Consistent with this, polarization in news consumption on Facebook—the gap in average slant between articles Republicans and Democrats consume—equals 89% of the distance between the average New York Times and Fox News article and is 53% larger than outlet-level measures imply.

Keywords: News (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 L82 L86 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big
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