Partisanship in Context: The (A)symmetric Influence of Local Newspaper Availability and Selective Exposure on Political Misperceptions in the U.S.

How people consume information and understand facts is an inherently multilevel problem, but inquiry frequently stops at the individual-level. We highlight how disparities in local newspaper availability across communities influence individuals’ partisan selective exposure and congruent political misperceptions. Using a quasi-experimental design enabling comparisons of individuals living in counties with different local newspaper availability but otherwise matched features, we found that lacking a local newspaper in one’s county is associated with a decrease in national mainstream media use. Moreover, lacking a local newspaper amplifies partisan selective consumption of liberal media, but not conservative media. Beliefs in falsehoods disseminated by elites from both major parties in the U.S. are influenced by selective exposure and amplified by local newspaper context, while liberal media use is more sensitive to the contextual variances in local news environments than conservative media use. Findings from this unique dataset are robust against various tests of confounding effects.