Anyone who has followed this election carefully would be forgiven for thinking that voters have diverged into two separate realities. But it’s too soon to declare that we have entered a “post-fact” apocalypse, especially when we consider where people get information about politics.
New research shows that the great majority of people learn about political news from mainstream, relatively centrist media sources, not ideological websites or cable channels. However, relatively small numbers of partisans, especially Republicans, are heavy consumers of a highly polarized media diet.
This dynamic helps explain why there is so much concern about “echo chambers,” even though most people don’t confine themselves to one.