The Unequal Challenge of Learning from Under-informative News

Political news consumption is highly uneven: few people consume directly from news outlets today, while many encounter news incidentally through social media and aggregators. Because news organizations depend on direct consumers for revenue, they aim to satisfy the preferences of their most prolific, politically-engaged consumers. These editorial decisions profoundly shape the way news is presented—such as by employing specialized political jargon, emphasizing partisan conflict, predicting future political outcomes, and using attention-grabbing clickbait. While these styles of news coverage may elicit more marketable engagement from habitual consumers, they may also make the news less accessible for others and limit what can be learned from typical news exposure. I conduct a creative preregistered experiment (n = 2,233) on political learning from contemporary news coverage. I show that, relative to a “public interest” coverage style that prioritizes clear and simple communication of critical information about policy and governance, common contemporary news styles weaken post-exposure recall of key news information. Recall penalties are especially severe for those with lower baseline political engagement, yet recall penalties affect highly-engaged consumers as well. This study shows that contemporary styles of news coverage broadly under-serve the public by obscuring critical information and inhibiting political learning.