CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 700Media Influence and PoliticsMedia Studies and CommunicationElectoral Systems and Political Participation

Facilitating Communication across Lines of Political Difference: The Role of Mass Media

Open access
Mutz, Diana C.·2001·American Political Science Review
DOI 10.1017/s0003055401000223
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

We use national survey data to examine the extent to which various sources of political information expose people to dissimilar political views. We hypothesize that the individual’s ability and desire to exercise selective exposure is a key factor in determining whether a given source produces exposure to dissimilar views. Although a lack of diverse perspectives is a common complaint against American news media, we find that individuals are exposed to far more dissimilar political views via news media than through interpersonal political discussants. The media advantage is rooted in the relative difficulty of selectively exposing oneself to those sources of information, as well as the lesser desire to do so, given the impersonal nature of mass media.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1017/s0003055401000223

Cites

1 of 1 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • The online news audience is less ideologically segregated than in-person interactions with family, friends, coworkers, and political discussants.

    “Research using internet traffic data has even suggested that the online news audience is in fact less ideologically segregated than in-person interactions with family, friends, coworkers, and political discussants (70–72).”

    From How digital media drive affective polarization through partisan sorting (2022) · cites this paper as [71]

    The section “Sources of Exposure to Cross-Cutting Political Views” finds that newspapers and television news expose people to more differing political views than interpersonal discussants, including workplace contacts. It does not establish the claim about online news audiences or use internet traffic data; “Implications of Availability and Selectivity” instead notes that people may select political websites that share their views. Page numbers are unavailable in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.88)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 50

  1. Altemeyer, Bob. 1996. The Authoritarian Specter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  2. Arendt, Hannah. 1968. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Viking Press.
  3. Barber, Benjamin. 1984. Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  4. Bellah, Robert N., Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton. 1985. Habits of the Heart: Individ- ualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  5. Benhabib, Seyla. 1992. Situating the Self. New York: Routledge.
  6. Berlin, Isaiah. 1969. Four Essays on Liberty. New York: Oxford University Press.
  7. Calhoun, Craig. 1988. "Populist Politics, Communication Media and Large Scale Societal Integration." Sociological Theory 6 (3): 219 - 41.
  8. Carey, James W. 1987. "The Press and the Public Discourse." The Center Magazine 20 (2): 4 -32.
  9. Dalton, Russell J., Paul Allen Beck, and Robert Huckfeldt. 1998. "Partisan Cues and the Media: Information Flows in the 1992 Presidential Election." American Political Science Review 92 (March): 111-26.
  10. Eliasoph, Nina. 1998. Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  11. Fabrigar, Leandre R., and Jon A. Krosnick. 1995. "Attitude Impor- tance and the False Consensus Effect." Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin 21 (5): 468 -79.
  12. Fearon, James. 1998. "Deliberation as Discussion." In Deliberative Democracy, ed. Jon Elster. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 44 -68.
  13. Fishkin, James S. 1991. Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
  14. Freedman, Jonathan L., and David O. Sears. 1965. "Selective Exposure." In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 2, ed. Leonard Berkowitz. New York: Academic Press. Pp. 58 -98.
  15. Frey, Dieter. 1986. "Recent Research on Selective Exposure to Information." In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 19, ed. Leonard Berkowitz. New York: Academic Press. Pp. 41-80.
  16. Frey, William H. 1995. "The New Geography of Population Shifts: Trends Toward Balkanization." In State of the Union: America in the 1990s, vol. 2, ed. Reynolds Farley. New York: Russell Sage. Pp. 271-336.
  17. Giner-Sorolla, Roger, and Shelly Chaiken. 1994. "The Causes of Hostile Media Judgments." Journal of Experimental Social Psychol- ogy 30 (2): 165-80.
  18. Granovetter, Mark. 1973. "The Strength of Weak Ties." American Journal of Sociology 78 (May): 1360 -80.
  19. Hallin, Daniel C. 1986. The "Uncensored War": The Media and Vietnam. New York: Oxford University Press.
  20. Harrison, Roderick J., and Claudette E. Bennett. 1995. "Racial and Ethnic Diversity." In State of the Union: America in the 1990s, vol. 2, ed. Reynolds Farley. New York: Russell Sage. Pp. 141-210.
  21. Huckfeldt, Robert, Paul Allen Beck, Russell J. Dalton, and Jeffrey Levine. 1995. "Political Environments, Cohesive Social Groups, and the Communication of Public Opinion." American Journal of Political Science 39 (4): 1025-54.
  22. Huckfeldt, Robert, and John Sprague. 1995a. Citizens, Politics, and Social Communication: Information and Influence in an Election Campaign. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  23. Robert P. Abelson, Elliot Aronson, William McGuire, Theodore Newcomb, Milton Rosenberg, and Percy Tannenbaum. Chicago: Rand-McNally. Pp. 788 -96.
  24. Katz, Elihu. 1981. "Publicity and Pluralistic Ignorance: Notes on the Spiral of Silence." In Public Opinion and Social Change: For Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, ed. Horst Baler, Hans Mathias Kep- plinger, and Kurt Reuman. Weisbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag. Pp. 28 -38.
  25. Katz, Elihu. 1996. "And Deliver Us from Segmentation." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 546: 22-33.
  26. Katznelson, Ira, and Margaret Weir. 1986. "Working-Class Forma- tion: Constructing Cases and Comparisons." In Working Class Formation, ed. Ira Katznelson and Aristide Zolberg. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University. Pp. 3-41.
  27. Kenny, Christopher B. 1994. "The Microenvironment of Attitude Change." Journal of Politics 56 (August): 715-28.
  28. Klapper, Joseph T. 1960. The Effects of Mass Communications. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
  29. Krueger, Joachim, and Russell W. Clement. 1994. "The Truly False Consensus Effect: An Ineradicable and Egocentric Bias in Social Perception." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67 (4): 596 -610.
  30. Levy, Frank. 1995. "Incomes and Income Inequality." In State of the Union: America in the 1990s, vol. 1: Economic Trends, ed. Reynolds Farley. New York: Russell Sage. Pp. 1-58.
  31. Lippmann, Walter. 1922. Public Opinion. New York: Free Press.
  32. Marcus, George E., John L. Sullivan, Elisabeth Theiss-Morse, and Sandra L. Wood. 1995. With Malice Toward Some: How People Make Civil Liberties Judgments. New York: Cambridge University Press.
  33. McLeod, Jack M., and Steven H. Chaffee. 1972. "The Construction of Social Reality." In The Social Influence Process, ed. James Tedeschi. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton. Pp. 50 -99.
  34. Neuman, W. Russell. 1991. The Future of the Mass Audience. New York: Cambridge.
  35. Page, Benjamin I. 1996. Who Deliberates? Mass Media in Modern Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  36. Sanders, Lynn M. 1977. "Against Deliberation." Political Theory 25 (3): 347-76.
  37. Schaeffer, Nora Cate. 1991. "Hardly Ever or Constantly? Group Comparisons Using Vague Quantifiers." Public Opinion Quarterly 55 (Fall): 395-423.
  38. Schiller, Herbert I. 1986. Information and the Crisis Economy. New York: Oxford University Press.
  39. Schudson, Michael. 1982. "The Ideal of Conversation in the Study of Mass Media." In Inter/Media: Interpersonal Communication in a Media World, ed. Gary Gumpert and Robert Cathcart. New York: Oxford. Pp. 41-8.
  40. Schudson, Michael. 1995. The Power of News. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  41. Schudson, Michael. 1997. "Why Conversation Is Not the Soul of Democracy." Critical Studies in Mass Communication 14 (4): 297-309.
  42. Sherif, Muzafer, and Carl I. Hovland. 1961. Social Judgment: Assim- ilation and Contrast Effects in Communication and Attitude Change. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
  43. Simonson, Peter. 1996. "Dreams of Democratic Togetherness: Com- munication Hope from Cooley to Katz." Critical Studies in Mass Communication 13 (4): 324 -42.
  44. Sullivan, John L., James Piereson, and George E. Marcus. 1982. Political Tolerance and American Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  45. Sweeney, Paul D., and Kathy L. Gruber. 1984. "Selective Exposure: Voter Information Preferences and the Watergate Affair." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46 (6): 1208 -21.
  46. Turow, Joseph. 1997. Breaking Up America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  47. Ulbig, Stacy G., and Cary L. Funk. 1999. "Conflict Avoidance and Political Participation." Political Behavior 21 (3): 265-82.
  48. Vallone, Robert P., Lee Ross, and Mark R. Lepper. 1985. "The Hostile Media Phenomenon: Biased Perception and Perception of Media Bias in Coverage of the Beirut Massacre." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 49 (3): 577-85.
  49. Watts, Mark D., David Domke, Dhavan V. Shah, and David P. Fan. 1999. "Elite Cues and Media Bias in Presidential Campaigns: Explaining Public Perceptions of a Liberal Press." Communication Research 26 (2): 144 -75.
  50. Zaller, John. 1992. The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Mutz, D. C.
Affiliations
The Ohio State University (US)
Corresponding author
Mutz, Diana C.
ORCID
Mutz, Diana C.
Venue
American Political Science Review
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Published
2001-03
Volume
95
Issue
1
Pages
97-114
ISSN
  • 0003-0554 (ISSN-L)
  • 1537-5943
DOI
10.1017/s0003055401000223
OpenAlex
W2148416306
Cited by
700
References
1
Citations by year
2026: 8 · 2025: 23 · 2024: 17 · 2023: 24 · 2022: 28 · 2021: 48 · 2020: 32 · 2019: 32 · 2018: 51 · 2017: 29 · 2016: 40 · 2015: 41 · 2014: 47 · 2013: 36 · 2012: 37
FWCI
79.90
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
www.cambridge.org/core/terms (unspecified, 392 d)
Locations
  • American Political Science Review (publishedVersion)
  • ScholarlyCommons (University of Pennsylvania) (submittedVersion)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
Funders
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Media Influence and Politics
  • Social Sciences › Communication › Media Studies and Communication
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Electoral Systems and Political Participation
Keywords
selective exposure, political information sources, mass media, interpersonal communication, political debate, news media, political polarization

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review