Is Journalistic Truth Dead? Measuring How Informed Voters Are about Political News
Name
angelucci-prat-2024-is-journalistic-truth-dead-measuring-how-informed-voters-are-about-political-news.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
738.45 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
1917a0ea1172f7307d04b6b14b1c45c4
Author(s)
Angelucci, Charles
Prat, Andrea
Date Issued
April 2024
Journal
American Economic Review
Publisher
American Economic Association
Citation
Angelucci, Charles, and Andrea Prat. 2024. "Is Journalistic Truth Dead? Measuring How Informed Voters Are about Political News." American Economic Review 114 (4): 887–925.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
To investigate general patterns in news information in the United States, we combine a protocol for identifying major political news stories, 11 monthly surveys with 15,000 participants, and a model of news discernment. When confronted with a true and a fake news story, 47 percent of subjects confidently choose the true story, 3 percent confidently choose the fake story, and the remaining half are uncertain. Socioeconomic differences are associated with large variations in the probability of selecting the true news story. Partisan congruence between an individual and a news story matters, but its impact is up to an order of magnitude smaller. (JEL D72, D83, L82).
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
10.1257/aer.20211003
