Abstract
Research on news exposure has shown that while political knowledge and interest largely determine the degree of active engagement with online news, some people are generally less willing to invest into actively staying informed. Instead, these people report to pursue a passive mode of relying on specific sources, such as social media, based on the belief that “news finds me” (NFM). Notably, the three dimensions of NFM—feeling informed, relying on peers, and not actively seeking news—combine intentions and perceptions related to news use. Understanding NFM perceptions, hence, requires an analytical distinction between active and passive modes of news use as well as reliable measures of (different types of) news exposure. We contribute to this field by combining a survey, tracked web-browsing data, and tracked Facebook data to investigate the relationship between NFM perceptions and exposure to online news, also taking into account political knowledge and interest as traditional predictors of active news use. Our results show that both political knowledge and interest are associated with more news exposure via web browsers and that political knowledge—but not political interest—is also associated with more news in people’s Facebook feeds. Compared with the NFM dimensions, political knowledge and interest are stronger predictors of online news exposure in our study. Taken together, the novel combination of Facebook and web tracking data provides evidence that online news exposure is shaped by a confluence of traditional factors and more diffuse interpersonal processes.
Highlights
People around the world are increasingly consuming news online (Newman et al, 2020)
This differentiation highlights different stages of media use and has implications for causal assumptions in that, for example, “not actively seeking” points to a priori predispositions for news use, whereas “feeling informed” rather describes a post hoc rationalization of previous or typical behavior. This raises questions about how these “passive” approaches to news use relate to more “active” media-use predictors traditionally discussed in research on news use. Building on these different predictors identified in prior research, the goal of our study is to assess how political interest and knowledge as traditional predictors of active news use compare to NFM perceptions as indicators of more passive news use when it comes to explaining actual online news exposure
Considering the limitations of self-reports on media use (Araujo et al, 2017; Prior, 2009; Scharkow, 2016), we look at actual news exposure as measured by tracking data to answer the three general research questions: (1) How do political interest and knowledge relate to observed news exposure in web-browsing histories and Facebook feeds? (2) How does NFM perception and its dimensions relate to observed news exposure in web-browsing histories and Facebook feeds? (3) How do political interest and knowledge and NFM perception and its dimensions interact?
Summary
People around the world are increasingly consuming news online (Newman et al, 2020). The quantity and diversity of online news sources create a “high-choice media environment” (van Aelst et al, 2017), in which users can come across news in a variety of ways. Regarding the elements that define an NFM perception, a recent study has suggested to differentiate the concept into three dimensions, namely, feeling informed, relying on peers, and not actively seeking for news (Song et al, 2020) This differentiation highlights different stages of media use and has implications for causal assumptions in that, for example, “not actively seeking” points to a priori predispositions for news use, whereas “feeling informed” rather describes a post hoc rationalization of previous or typical behavior. This raises questions about how these “passive” approaches to news use relate to more “active” media-use predictors traditionally discussed in research on news use
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