In the authors' words, 'polarized media consumption is much more common among an important segment of the public-the most politically active, knowledgeable, and engaged. suggest that one reason the filter-bubble narrative is so popular in the press is because it's much more likely to be true of political writers and the people they cover. It's that people aren't as politically self-segregated as the narrative has it, and that the most popular media-consumption tribes aren't organized around news or political commentary at all.

The point here isn't that the network newscasts are themselves free of ideology (they aren't!) or that viewers are getting their news from The Big Bang Theory. These audiences are in turn dwarfed by those for entertainment, where programs like The Big Bang Theory and Sunday Night Football attract as many as 20 million viewers. By comparison, about 24 million Americans tune into nightly network news broadcasts on NBC, ABC, and CBS and over 10 million viewers watch these networks' Sunday morning political talk shows.

The audience of Fox News and MSNBC peaks at 2 million to 3 million for well-known shows by hosts like Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow in prime time.

On television, media outlets with a significant partisan or ideological slant simply do not reach most of the U.S. People also tend to self-report a filtered media diet.īut studies that actually track people's behavior tell a different story. In controlled experiments, people do prefer congenial information over uncongenial information-a tendency that is especially prevalent in the domain of politics. Summarizing several studies, they argue that 'the 'echo chambers' narrative captures, at most, the experience of a minority of the public.' For example: Four academics-Andrew Guess, Benjamin Lyons, Brendan Nyhan, and Jason Reifler-have just published a skeptical take on the topic. Pariser's portrait may be popular, but that doesn't mean it's well-grounded.

It's possible that they just seem ubiquitous in my own particular bubble. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts instead we're being offered parallel but separate universes.' If you follow elite political discourse, you've probably heard several ever-more-worried versions of that idea. Americans, he warned in his 2011 book The Filter Bubble, are 'more and more enclosed in our own little bubbles. The fear of filter bubbles has only grown stronger since Eli Pariser popularized the term at the beginning of the decade.

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