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We can compute a news audience polarisation score for each country – based on the standard deviation of outlet audiences, weighted by their size – that reflects the degree to which polarisation approaches a theoretical maximum, where only outlets with an entirely left-leaning and entirely right-leaning outlets exist, with nothing in between. This is partly because fewer people self-identify with either the left or the right in Germany, precluding very high levels of news audience polarisation along this dimension (though, of course, both the public and news audiences may be polarised along different dimensions). In Germany, although some new digital-born brands have emerged in recent years, audiences for most outlets are predominantly centrist. News audiences are less polarised in Norway, but while most traditional newspaper and broadcast brands have mixed and/or centrist audiences, they have recently been joined by several partisan/alternative brands – like Document.no and HRS – that have audiences with a stronger political skew – occupying space further from the centre of the map. The spread of the bubbles in the next chart shows that news audience polarisation is higher than in Norway and Germany, but lower than in the USA – where there is no large outlet in the middle of the map, highlighting the importance of public service media as a central anchor in much of Europe (though local news media, which we do not plot here, may partly fulfil this role in the USA). The UK has a relatively high level of news audience polarisation. News audience polarisation varies by country The largest bubble on the map, which represents the audience for BBC News, is much closer to the mid-point, indicating a mixed and/or centrist audience that closely resembles the political make-up of the UK as a whole. In the UK, as we have seen before, some newspaper outlets like the Guardian have a more left-leaning audience compared to the national population, whereas others – like the Daily Mail – have an audience that skews right. We can start by mapping news audience polarisation based on our most recent data from 2022. Finally, the level of news audience polarisation in each country is the average distance between outlet audiences (computed using the standard deviation), weighted by audience size so that larger outlets count for more. Then, in each country, we plot the audience for every outlet onto a single map, creating an audience-centric overview of the national media landscape. Using this measure, a score of -0.50 indicates that an outlet has an audience entirely made up of people who self-identify with the political left, 0.50 indicates an audience entirely made up of people on the right, and 0 an audience that matches the population.
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In short, we compare the left–right make-up of each news outlet’s combined online and offline audience to the left–right make-up of the national population, allowing us to see whether each outlet’s audience skews left or skews right from the population average, and by how much. The approach we use to map news audience polarisation builds on work we first introduced in the 2017 Digital News Report, with the specific method described in a peer-reviewed academic journal article (Fletcher et al.
Listen on: Spotify | Apple | Google How we measure news audience polarisation At the same time, we also see that the audience profile of some individual outlets has changed markedly, and that national patterns of polarisation to some extent map onto how audiences themselves see the media landscape in their country. By mapping the degree of news audience polarisation in different countries, we show that polarisation is generally low because most news outlets attract mixed and/or centrist audiences, that there are large differences in news audience polarisation by country, and that levels of news audience polarisation have changed little since 2016.
The data we present in this chapter challenge all three of these assumptions. Implicit in this narrative is the notion, first, that everyone has a strong and exclusive preference for news outlets they agree with, second, that such preferences are intensifying over time, and third, that this process is mirrored across different countries and media systems. And partisan news media – combined with people’s well-documented preference for news outlets that share their political views – are often blamed for driving people further apart, leaving each of us with fundamentally different ideas about the key issues in society.
Divisive political moments create a sense that we live in a time of heightened political polarisation.