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People actively alter how much and what kind of news they read depending on whether the day’s headlines are favorable or unfavorable to their preferred political party. New research published in the American Journal of Political Science demonstrates that news consumption is highly dynamic, with both Democrats and Republicans shifting their browsing habits in response to negative coverage. These shifts can include avoiding hard news, ending a reading session early, or retreating to ideologically aligned outlets.
In the modern media environment, people face an overwhelming amount of information and almost limitless choices about what to read. Researchers have studied how this abundance affects political knowledge, often focusing on two broad behaviors. The first is selective exposure, where individuals seek out news outlets that confirm their existing political beliefs. The second is news avoidance, a behavior where people disengage from current events entirely, often due to feelings of anxiety or information overload. Both behaviors carry implications for a functioning society, as avoiding the news entirely can lead to lower levels of civic engagement and public knowledge.
These behaviors are frequently treated as stable traits, categorizing people as either constant news avoiders or loyal consumers of partisan media. But human behavior is rarely so static. People might feel motivated to read the news during major political events but choose to tune out when the headlines become upsetting or challenge their worldview. When people encounter information that contradicts their core values, they experience a form of psychological discomfort known as cognitive dissonance. To restore mental balance, an individual might actively avoid the source of that discomfort or seek out information that reassures them.
A team of researchers led by Michael Heseltine, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam, investigated whether news consumption fluctuates based on immediate political developments. Heseltine, along with political scientists Hennes Barnehl at the University of California San Diego and Magdalena Wojcieszak at the University of California Davis, proposed a concept they call partisan temporal selective avoidance.
They hypothesized that people dynamically adjust their news habits to avoid cognitive dissonance based on whether the current news cycle reflects poorly on their own political party or their opponents. The researchers wanted to know if partisans completely stop reading the news, switch to entertainment stories, or retreat to friendly news outlets when their party faces a scandal.
To test this idea, the researchers analyzed the online browsing histories in a large study of 2,462 adult internet users in the United States over a nine-month period in 2019. The dataset included more than 27 million individual web visits, which the researchers filtered using a comprehensive list of over 5,000 national and local news domains. The researchers used machine learning tools to categorize the visited news articles. They distinguished between hard news, which covers politics and economics, and soft news, which covers topics like local crime, sports, and entertainment.
To accurately assess the political tone of millions of articles, the researchers built two automated text classifiers. They trained these machine learning models using thousands of social media posts from mainstream news organizations like The Associated Press and Reuters. Human coders manually labeled a subset of these posts to teach the software how to identify negative sentiment toward Republican or Democratic politicians. Once trained, the software scanned the titles of the articles in the participants’ browsing histories to determine the political tone of each visit.
The research team evaluated the data on two levels. First, they conducted a macro-level analysis to see how the overall daily news environment affected reading habits. They assigned a daily sentiment score based on whether the dominant news stories of the day were negative toward Democrats or Republicans. By averaging the sentiment of major news coverage over a rolling three-day period, the researchers created a snapshot of the general political climate. Then, they compared these daily scores to the actual browsing behaviors of the study participants.
On this daily level, the researchers found that partisans reacted to unfavorable news cycles in different ways. When the daily news environment was negative toward their own party, Democrats did not decrease their overall news consumption. Instead, they reduced their consumption of hard news, pivoting toward soft news topics. When the news was negative toward Republicans, Democrats consumed more news articles overall.
Republicans exhibited a different pattern in response to the daily news cycle. When the news was negative toward their own party, Republicans slightly increased their overall news consumption. However, this increase was primarily driven by a shift toward ideologically aligned, conservative news outlets. When the daily news cycle was negative toward Democrats, Republicans did not make statistically significant changes to their news consumption.
The researchers also conducted a micro-level analysis to see what happens within an individual browsing session after a person reads a specific article. They tracked users sequentially to measure the immediate effect of reading a negative political story. This allowed the team to see if encountering an unfavorable headline prompted users to abandon the news entirely or seek out different types of content in real time.
At this granular level, reading a negative article about one’s own party reduced the length of the remaining news browsing session. For both Democrats and Republicans, encountering a story that cast their preferred party in a negative light made them more likely to stop reading the news shortly afterward. If Democrats were browsing a mainstream or non-aligned outlet and encountered an unfavorable article, they were slightly more likely to switch to a left-leaning outlet for the remainder of their session. Republicans also exhibited an increase in reading negative news about their own party after an initial exposure, though this often occurred on ideologically aligned platforms.
Encountering negative news about the opposing party also shaped subsequent behavior. For Democrats, reading an article negative toward Republicans slightly decreased the length of their overall reading session. Yet for both groups, exposure to a negative story about the opposition prompted them to seek out a higher proportion of hard news and additional negative news stories before they closed their browsers. This suggests that reading bad news about a political rival can be highly engaging, motivating partisans to dive deeper into political coverage.
The study relies on browsing data from 2019, a period dominated by the first impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump. During this time, the overall news environment was consistently more negative toward Republicans than Democrats. The differences in how Democrats and Republicans adjusted their reading habits might reflect the specific political dynamics of that year rather than permanent psychological differences between the two groups. Future research will need to examine whether these specific partisan differences persist under different political administrations.
The findings are based solely on desktop and laptop web browsing. This data collection method misses news consumed via smartphones, television broadcasts, print media, and radio. As a result, the study captures only a portion of the participants’ total media diets. The research also focuses entirely on the two-party political system of the United States. It remains unknown how people in countries with multiparty systems adjust their news consumption when faced with unfavorable coverage of their preferred political groups.
The study, “Partisan temporal selective news avoidance: Evidence from online trace data,” was authored by Michael Heseltine, Hennes Barnehl, and Magdalena Wojcieszak.