The next Economics Seminar of Paris-Saclay will take place on Thursday, February 16 from 12h15 to 13h15. Charles Angelucci (MIT) will present “Is Journalistic Truth Dead? Measuring How Informed Voters are About Political News”.
Abstract:
To investigate general patterns in news information in the US, we combine a protocol for identifying major political news stories, 11 monthly surveys, three different samples, and a model of news discernment. When confronted with a true and a fake news story, 47% of subjects confidently choose the true story, 3% 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 too, but has an impact that is up to an order of magnitude smaller.