In the good old days, those seeking news had limited choices, and those outlets tended to want to maximize circulation and thus limited their ideological slant. Technological and economic forces over the last few decades have opened up news markets and greatly expanded the number of news outlets available. That's had two major consequences - news consumers have greater choice, and the multiplicity of outlets has encouraged greater ideological diversification. Critics have alleged that this "cyber-balkanization" is socially harmful - that rather than delivering a common message, competing outlets and ideologies encourage polarization of news use and, as a result, political perspectives.
Researchers at the University of Chicago have tried to measure that first presumption - that given a choice, people prefer to use news sites that more closely reflect their own ideology. They use an interesting multistage approach - they identify a number of news outlets (119 online sites, 5 cable news networks, major broadcast networks with evening newscasts, 3 "national" newspapers (NYTimes, USA Today, Wall Street Journal), 10 news and opinion magazines, and include a generic "local newspaper" measure). They use individual survey results self-identifying political perspective and self-reported media use to construct the "share conservative" for each outlet - the percentage of people who identify as conservative among those who use that outlet. They then construct a measure of "conservative exposure" for each individual - defined as the average of the "share conservative" measures for the media outlets they report using. They then measure segregation by an "isolation index", defined as the difference in the average "conservative exposure" scores for self-identified conservatives from the average "conservative exposure" for self-identified liberals.
The journalist perspective, or at least the report on the study on the Journalist's Resource website, makes a big deal out of the reported result that the "isolation index" is higher for readers of online news than it is for broadcast network news, cable news, national magazines, and local newspapers, while acknowledging that the difference is greater for those reading national newspapers. Further, the online news isolation index is much smaller than the differences within the communities those individuals interact with. They also try to make a claim that top news websites are relatively centrist, and report a finding that the average "share conservative" of sites are more extreme than the average "conservative exposure" of individuals, but quote a misinterpretation by the researchers to suggest that users of more extreme sites get most of their news from other, more centrist, sites. (Since the study only measures "use of" sites, and not amounts of news consumption, there's no basis for the conclusion - what that result means is that while some sources may have more homogeneous users, that individuals tend to be more heterogeneous in their use of news outlets). And there's the underlying "conservatives are dumb because they rely on the internet" tone to the interpretation and presentation of results which is not supported by the study data.
But if you look at the actual reported results, you can get a different picture. Conservatives are actually heavier users (percentage using daily is higher than population percentage) of cable news and local newspapers, while liberals are heavier users of the Internet, magazines, and national newspapers. The study also reports that segregation, as measured by the isolation index, has been declining over time. The researchers conclude that their results support two key features of online news - that there are a large number of highly differentiated sites, and that online news users visit a range of sites reflecting a range of ideological perspectives. This, they conclude, would tend to mitigate concerns that proliferation of nontraditional news sources will increase ideological polarization.
There's three additional limits of the study that I'll stress. First, the researchers did not look at the actual content of the sites - the results aren't indicators of how conservative, liberal, or even ideologically consistent a news source is, only of the proportion of users self-identifying as conservative. To be clear - the study shows nothing directly about the actual ideological slant of a site, or whether a site is ideologically consistent or diverse, and its findings should not be used to label news outlets as extreme or centrist. Second, the online news source usage is from a different study and sample than was used for other media use measures, and is therefore not necessarily directly comparable. Further, there's a lot of missing data that dropped the originally identified 1379 online sites identified as news and opinion sites to a final sample of 119 of the larger sites (and included news aggregators as well as those with original content). While this doesn't necessarily invalidate the online results, interpretations, particularly in comparisons to other media, should be made cautiously. Finally, while it's a 2011 published study, the data were collected in 2008 (or earlier in some cases) - thus the results should not be interpreted as reflecting current attitudes, preferences, or uses.
For all the limits, it's still an interesting approach and result.
Sources: Ideological Segregation Online and Offline, Journalist's Resource
Ideological Segregation Online and Offline, Quarterly Journal of Economics
edit track - (fixed some typos, added one sentence to clarify first limitation (1/18)
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