Americans don’t live in partisan news echo chambers

Popular belief holds that with the increasing polarization of partisan politics, Americans increasingly consume only news sources that support their favored policy and ideology, especially online sources. Using survey research, R. Kelly Garrett, Dustin Carnahan and Emily K. Lynch find the purported ‘echo chamber effect’ to be false. Not only are Americans not abandoning mainstream news sources for partisan sources online, those who do use news sources that share their point of view are more likely to also use sources that have an opposite agenda.