Just. Welcome to Future of Journalism podcast from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.
I'm Federico Cherubini, head of Leadership Development at the Institute.
This is a special series on our podcast and it's dedicated to Digital News Report 2022.
Over seven episodes we are diving into the most comprehensive piece of research on news consumption around the world.
In this episode of the series, we're joined by Director Research Richard Fletcher, who has authored a chapter on the report on polarisation in News.
We look at where the news audiences really are as primaries and some, I think,
and whether there has been any change since 2016 and how people perceive polarisation in their country's news environment.
Richard, welcome to the podcast. Thank you.
So you chapter in the report sets out to determine the level of polarisation amongst news audiences in four countries.
First, can you explain the term polarisation?
What does it mean, especially in regards to news audiences and how you can measure it?
Well, normally when people use the term polarisation that they usually referring to the kind of extent of the differences in attitudes,
beliefs between different people or different groups, or sometimes how people feel about those in different groups.
But here, very interested in something slightly different. So we're interested in news audience behaviour.
So the tendency for people to use said news outlets and not to use others.
So in the U.K., for example, we know that an outlet like the BBC has quite mixed audiences.
But also we know that people on the left are more likely to use outlets like the Guardian,
and people on the right are more likely to use news outlets like The Mail.
So what we're interested in is measuring the extent to which people behave like this and then to compare across countries.
And we do this by looking at the online and offline audiences for the main news outlets in each country,
and then seeing how different they are from the net, from the population as a whole.
So if a country has lots of outlets with strongly left leaning audiences and strongly right leaning audiences,
then we can think of it as having a relatively high degree of news audience polarisation.
However, if outlets have mainly mixed or centrist audiences, then the degree of news audience polarisation is relatively low.
You chose, I think, as we mentioned, four countries Norway, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S.
Can you tell us why you chose these countries specifically? I think the main reason was that we expected to be able to observe differences between
between those countries so that each represents different types of media system,
which means, for example, they have different levels of funding for public service media,
different levels of journalistic professionalism, and also different levels of political parallelism.
So that's the extent to which news outlets reflect the views of said political parties or political groups, especially historically.
And we know that also just more broadly,
that countries like the UK and the US are usually thought of as more politically polarised than Norway and Germany.
The digital news report team first started measuring polarisation in 2016.
Since then, there has been a series of divisive ballots,
including an election involving Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, as well as the UK Brexit referendum.
The media, of course, play a key role in covering these and perhaps influencing people's decision around how to vote.
Gut instinct might say that polarisation has increased since 2016.
Is this true? As it's been a shift? Well, at least when it comes to the news audience polarisation and at least from our data, the answer is no.
News audience polarisation doesn't seem to have changed much since 2016.
So in other words, the extent to which people gravitate towards certain news outlets based on their
political beliefs doesn't seem to have changed in each of these four countries.
But at the same time, of course, that doesn't mean that other types of polarisation,
such as the ones I mentioned earlier, have stayed the same as well.
So ideological polarisation amongst the public, it may have shifted.
An elite political discourse may have also become more polarised than it was.
And of course, that's particularly important because that might also mean that the political position is represented by major news outlets,
and that coverage may have sort of drifted further apart ideologically.
But I said we're focussed here on news audience behaviour, at least this is that hasn't changed since 2016.
So people are still navigating the news environment in the same way, even though they may have changed.
Coming to the actual results of what you found in the survey, what differences do you find between countries and you know,
can you tell us which of the four shows the most polarisation amongst news audiences?
Well,
the U.S. says that the highest level of news audience polarisation and this is because it has a lot of outlets basically with left leaning audience.
There's also a handful of outlets with strongly right leaning audiences and relatively few outlets with mixed or centrist audiences.
So there's lots of outlets with strongly skewed audiences that the UK has the second
highest level of news audience polarisation and in some ways it's similar to the US.
But the main difference is that it has some outlets such as the BBC and other large TV brands that attract
audiences from both sides of the political spectrum and also those who who self-identify as being in the centre.
And this ultimately lowers the the level of news audience polarisation that we see as a whole across across the U.K., in Germany,
in Norway, there are fewer outlets with skewed audiences if compared to the US and the UK, most attracts mixed or centrist audiences.
And those that attract slightly skewed audiences tend to be niche,
politically focussed outlets that have small audiences, so they have a relatively small effect on the overall picture.
I think the other thing to point out is that even in a country like the U.S. and to a certain extent the U.K.,
the kind of overall level of news audience polarisation that we see is, is is fairly low.
And what I mean by that is that it's quite far away from what we might think of as the theoretical maximum level of polarisation.
And so even though we do see differences across countries, none of them, I would say, are massively polarised in terms of news audience behaviour.
Here to tell us a bit more about what of you know what about a news environment makes the polarisation fairly low.
What are the reason for low polarisation?
Well, as I mentioned, having and having large outlets in particular that have mixed or centrist audiences tends to help.
And at least in parts of Northern Europe, public service media tends to provide this, but also in many cases,
large commercial TV outlets and also large newspaper brands, kind of kind of as well.
Of course, you know, the audience does it often in response to that, to the content.
And this matters a lot.
So if outlets produce coverage, that is less tie it to a particular political position than we might expect it to attract a more mixed audience.
For that reason, it's also worth pointing out that in a country like Germany,
the proportion who self-identified with the political right or the political left in the first place is a bit lower than in a country like the UK,
for example. And ultimately this can have an effect on the kind of the level of news audience polarisation that's possible.
But I want to reiterate that it's really primarily influenced by behaviour and not this and not this, this fact.
You mentioned that, you know, since 2016, there has been a massive change in terms of light level of polarisation, of news audiences.
And this is despite significant changes in online news use overall.
And on the online news environment, thinking like smartphone usage,
divided social media and aggregators as gateways to news paywalls and digital first news brand.
We've seen a lot of change yet. This measure of polarisation, of news audiences have it doesn't seem to have changed that much.
What do you think is down to?
Well, I think that changes in in news audience polarisation possible, but it's primarily influenced by the outlets that people choose to use.
And despite some of the changes that you've described, people tend to use the same big newspaper and TV outlets that they always have.
Even if we look at online news use,
other data from the digital news report shows that in most cases the lists of the most widely used brands tends to stay
pretty similar year on year because people again are going back to the the same news sources that they always have.
And I suspect that when it comes to polarisation, any changes that will that we see will be in the in the long term.
So thinking and perhaps in terms of decades rather than years.
But the fact that we can see quite considerable differences between between countries shows that
if there are changes and there are different is the method we use should be able to detect them.
It's just that we haven't seen them since 2016. Turning to changes amongst individual news outlets,
has there been any significant change amongst audiences of particular news outlets in Kiev analysed in the report?
And any explanation for this? We do see some changes at the level of individual outlets.
So in some cases, outlets perhaps have a more mixed or centrist audience than they had in 2016.
Others have have become more skewed towards the left or the right.
I think it's difficult to know from our data what's actually behind this, but there are some possible explanations.
So if an outlet, for example, has a more centrist audience,
that's perhaps because they're attracting more people via social media where people
can be instantly exposed to news and it's less down to their political preferences,
what news they encounter. In other cases, the introduction of a paywall might make a difference,
and in others it may simply because the outlets changes editorial line and therefore
is appealing to different groups of people that perhaps it wasn't before.
But I said it's difficult to know this format from our data alone, but we do see some changes for the audiences,
for individual events outside from the this focus on the chapter on the four specific countries that you look at.
You also asked in the general survey and to all 46 markets about reception of news media polarisation in their respective countries.
Can you tell us exactly what did you ask them?
Well, we asked him how politically close together or far apart they think the major news outlets are in that country.
Of course, if people say that they think outlets are politically far apart,
this would this would indicate that people are perceiving a high degree of polarisation.
And if people say that close together, that express that perceiving a lower degree of polarisation.
And as always, we do see a lot of differences across countries, across regions when we ask this.
But on the whole, at least with the data we have, it seems to map on reasonably well to what we see in terms of patterns of news audience behaviour.
But again, this it's important to reiterate this is it, this is people's perception.
And and there are also sort of important differences between what people perceive and what people what is actually happening.
And we can identify that in some cases with this data.
Did you see any? What are the main takeaways from country to country?
Variation from country to country? I said I think it mainly maps to what we know from news audience polarisation.
So countries which tend to have a lower level of news audience polarisation tend to also have lower levels of perceived polarisation and vice versa.
I think sometimes there is a sort of like a narrative, maybe not really data in form,
it seems maybe from from your report, you often hear people saying is more divided than ever.
And your chapter seems to be saying that news audiences are not has more divided ever.
What is why is this narrative at odds? What can you tell us more about this?
Well, I think it is something that you hear people say, and I think it's often because people are very much caught up in the presence.
And it may feel like society is more divided than ever.
But at the same time, we can often think back over several decades and remember bitter political disputes from the from the past.
And then and perhaps that helps us put in put into context what we're going through today.
That being said, of course, I mean,
there are some or there may be some aspects of polarisation that are becoming stronger over time in particular countries.
So again, elite discourse may becoming more polarised, people's attitudes may becoming more polarised as well.
But what I think our research can do in looking specifically at these audience polarisation is,
I think, is to help us understand the role of the media in any changes that we see.
And I think, as I mentioned earlier, because we can see that overall,
even in a country like the US, the level of news audience polarisation is is relatively low.
That helps us think about the, you know, the potential of the media and in shaping some of these changes.
And it helps us to perhaps look past some of the more simplistic accounts of change that involve the media,
which are often predicated on the idea that everyone is is making highly political and
news media choices and people are ending up in a highly siloed information environment.
And that's that's just not what we see in our data.
Richard, thank you so much for helping us understand a bit better this very complicated issue and joining the podcast today.
Thank you. Our guest today was Richard Fletcher, director of research at the Institute and one of the authors of the recent news report.
Thank you all for listening to this episode of Digital News Report 2022 Part Series.
You can catch up on other episodes on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
If you want to read the report in full, you can find it online and Digital News Report about August 20, 22.
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