IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/wpaper/hal-03533356.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

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

Author

Listed:
  • Charles Angelucci

    (MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

  • Andrea Prat

    (Columbia University [New York])

Abstract

How many voters are informed about political news mainstream journalists consider important? We develop a methodology that combines a protocol for identifying major news stories, online surveys, and the estimation of a model that disentangles individual information precision from news story salience and partisanship. We focus on news about U.S. politics in a monthly sample of 1,000 voters repeated 8 times. On average, 85% of individuals are able to distinguish the major real news story of the month from fake news. 59% of individuals confidently believe this news story to be true, 39% are uncertain, and 3% confidently believe it to be false. Our results indicate that the starkest pattern about the ability of voters to identify major news stories is not the generalized death of truth or its ideological polarization but rather its unequal distribution along socioeconomic lines.

Suggested Citation

  • Charles Angelucci & Andrea Prat, 2021. "Is Journalistic Truth Dead? Measuring How Informed Voters Are about Political News," Working Papers hal-03533356, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-03533356
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-03533356
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-03533356/document
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-03533356. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.