Impact of Partisan Bias
These clear partisan divides in American news media consumption and trust are reflected — and influenced — by a variety of factors at national and local levels. It is important to note that politicians and powerful political actors have labeled U.S. journalists 'liberal elites' for decades, and talk radio has decried liberal bias in the 'mainstream media' since at least the 1980s. Put another way, the discrediting of journalistic actors as partisan agents is a phenomenon that goes back many years.
However, more recently, those attacks have become more common, targeted, and intense. Additionally, they have originated with actors at the highest levels of government. Most notable among these is former U.S. President Donald Trump, who frequently verbally attacked journalistic actors since he was elected. Three months after taking office, Trump called the news media "the enemy of the American People" and "fake news" in a tweet that derided the New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN by name. Throughout his time in the Oval Office, Trump and his administration also prevented some journalists who regularly covered the White House for many years from attending its press briefings, and instead granted press passes to self-described journalists working at highly partisan media who offered favorable coverage. Members of the Trump administration also called journalists "sick people" who didn’t like the United States and wanted "to take away our history and our heritage."
These partisan attacks on journalistic outlets encourage Americans to question, doubt, and in the most extreme cases, attack news and information that don’t align with a particular political viewpoint. When espoused by powerful political actors, these kinds of sentiments have proven to be contagious. Research shows that people who are exposed to allegations of "fake news" by elite actors (e.g., powerful politicians) both display less trust in journalistic media and are less likely to correctly identify what news is real.
Perceptions of political bias in journalism are also tied to perceptions of general bias. According to a 2018 Knight Foundation study, Americans consider 62% of news they consume on TV, in newspapers, and on the radio to be "biased," and 44% of it to be inaccurate. The same study revealed that Americans also do not distinguish between bias and inaccuracy, generally finding that the journalistic outlets they believe to be biased are also promulgators of inaccurate information, and vice versa. This lack of trust has negative implications for media literacy. For example, people with more trust in news media are more likely to be able to distinguish real news from opinion.
Over time, audiences have also become conditioned to seek out news from the outlets that align most with their own political views while avoiding those that challenge their beliefs. This behavior is called partisan selective exposure. It creates a pattern in which people consume media content that reinforces their opinions and choose to opt out of divergent perspectives (that could alter their political beliefs). Put another way, they increasingly seek out echo chambers. Additionally, technological actants increasingly make it easier for people to unintentionally find themselves in a filter bubble, with search and recommendation algorithms prodding them toward content that reinforces their existing beliefs. (Consider the YouTube algorithms that automatically queue up a 'suggested' video when you finish watching the one you initially searched for. Such recommendations are often toward like-minded content.)
Over time, the exposure to partisan news influences audiences' voting decisions and their political participation. For example, when audiences read only news that agrees with their political beliefs, they are more likely to simultaneously become radicalized and want to participate further in politics. This, in turn, can create problems for democratic decision-making as highly motivated individuals become convinced that they are right — based on information (i.e., an understanding of the reality) that diverges widely those who do not share their perspective. Such exposure also impacts support for particular policies. For example, a 2021 Pew Research Center study found that Republicans who selected only sources with right-leaning audiences (e.g., Fox News or talk radio) as their major sources of political news tended to be less open to international cooperation and had different foreign policy priorities than other Republicans. On the other hand, Democrats who selected only sources with left-leaning audiences (e.g., MSNBC or The Washington Post) tended to place a higher priority on multilateralism and addressing climate change, relative to other Democrats.
People who consume political news online or from non-mainstream sources are also more likely to believe that news information that reflects their own partisan beliefs is more credible than news that disagrees with their beliefs. Put another way, audiences who prefer online news media are particularly predisposed to seeking out news from confirmatory sources — that is, outlets that reinforce their worldviews. (This is not a function of technology but rather that online spaces offer easier access to a larger number of news sources, including highly partisan and pseudo-journalistic outlets.)
Moreover, through the psychological process of motivated reasoning, highly partisan news consumers are also likely to treat counter-factual information (e.g., news that goes against their preconceptions) as false information. After rejecting that news, those reasoning processes may actually result in the false information becoming more entrenched in their original preconceptions. This presents a significant challenge to correcting inaccurate information, not least by journalistic fact-checking outlets (e.g., Politifact) that have found themselves under increased attack in recent years.
Motivated reasoning has been used to help explain the rapid growth of increasingly partisan news outlets. For example, as people’s worldviews become more radicalized, motivated reasoning pushes them to move toward even more partisan outlets. Indeed, a 2021 Pew Research Center study found that although Fox News remained a primary news source for self-identified Republicans and Moderates, the more conservative Newsmax and One America News continued to grow — and were especially appealing to more conservative Republicans and older, White Americans. (Newsmax and One America News have generally been regarded by media scholars as poor sources of information.)