Exploring correlations between news consumption, trust and partisanship

How news consumption is intertwined with partisanship

At the Medill Local News Initiative, an analysis of county election results found that people in news deserts voted overwhelmingly for president-elect Trump. Most of these counties were in solidly red states, but Trump also won counties in Oregon, Virginia and Illinois. Paul Farhi and John Volk write that these voters were more likely to consume national news and not benefit from local voices about how issues will affect them personally. 

And Suzanne Sataline writes for the Columbia Journalism Review about Bucks County, Penn.„ a key swing county where news consumption demonstrated a basic split in the electorate. A local media librarian said that the information overload was too much for residents to sift through. “We have a news economy without editors. No gatekeepers,” said Matthew K. Seibert of Bucks County Community College. 

Where this split started is unclear. A new analysis of 46 countries from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that a drop in trust in journalism is highly correlated with a decline in television news viewership, writes Sarah Scire for Nieman Lab. But the paper’s authors say they cannot identify the direction of the causation — is a lack of trust pushing people away from television news, or has getting news from other sources soured people’s trust in the mainstream media? 

News In Focus 
Headlines, resources and events aligned with API’s four areas of focus.

Civic Discourse & Democracy

>> Martial law didn’t silence South Korea’s media. It empowered them. (The New York Times) 

When South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law on Tuesday, news outlets in the country — even conservative ones aligned with Yoon and his party — united against his anti-media actions. Even though the president had declared all media and publications under his control, news outlets continued to cover Yoon’s decision and the accompanying backlash. 

>> Who still trusts legacy media? Fox News, that’s who. (The Washington Post) 

Despite Fox News hosts’ bashing of mainstream media outlets, they continue to cite legacy media outlets in their shows. This is because, despite the network’s public denunciation of traditional media, it has never moved past the cable news model of aggregating and analyzing news stories broken by other media outlets. 

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Culture & Inclusion

>> Ida’s legacy: How BIPOC journalists and publishers became the authority on truth and democracy (Prism)

Alicia Bell, Brittaney Carter and DaLyah Jones write that BIPOC-led and -serving news outlets offer a necessary antidote to mainstream media because they are focused on “uncovering and spreading hard truths” in the vein of Ida B. Wells. 

>> New from API: How API Local News Summits help news leaders and non-news experts collaborate on solutions

API’s summits are challenge-focused. Rather than an open conference program tied by the bonds of the people attending, we bring together a diverse range of news leaders from different mediums and business models to work through a shared challenge. Another mark of these summits is the expertise from outside of journalism. 

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Community Engagement & Trust

>> LA Times to publish ‘bias meter’ on news stories, owner says (The Wrap)

Patrick Soon-Shiong says that the newspaper will use AI to give readers an indication of the “bias” of news stories or opinion pieces. He also said that users will be able to “press a button and get both sides of that exact same story” based on the original text. 

+ Dig Deeper: Staffers at the Los Angeles Times described a demoralized publication depleted of its spirit in which employees are “confused,” “offended” and “frustrated” (Status) 

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Revenue & Resilience

>> New from API: How to better connect fundraising asks to your journalism (Better News) 

Community engagement should “feel as if you’re at a town meeting and somebody’s saying, ‘Hey, this is what we’re doing. If you want to drop a dollar in the basket on your way out the door, we’d really appreciate that,’” says Gillian White, chief revenue officer at Capital B. 

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What else you need to know

🪧 Guardian journalists strike over proposed sale of Observer to Tortoise Media (The Guardian)

🫱🏽‍🫲🏿 Dow Jones negotiates AI usage agreements with nearly 4,000 news publishers (Nieman Lab) 

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Weekend reads

+ Not if, but how: Mongabay’s mission to report on untold environmental stories (Columbia Journalism Review)

+ A journalist in a post-newspaper world. W(h)ither the news? (Substack, R.J. Marx) 

+ Sanctions were meant to stop Russian propaganda. They’re hurting vital journalism too. (Columbia Journalism Review)

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