Is Journalistic Truth Dead?

Charles Angelucci, Andrea Prat. 2023. “Is Journalistic Truth Dead? Measuring How Informed Voters Are About Political News.” Working paper, downloaded September 2023.
Check the authors’ websites for the posted paper:
sites.google.com/site/charles...
econ.columbia.edu/econpeople/...
How informed are U.S. voters about political news, and can they confidently distinguish between true and fake news stories?
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[@nnkk7742]

Accountability for public officials and organizations intentionally spreading falsehoods. Either those spreading the bad information need to go or the people susceptible to it need to go.

[@wvereijssen9449]

good video

[@_zurr]

Hmm, this may be a ghost pattern, but I find it very curious that being essentially the ultimate boomer makes you more likely to select the truth. Though to be fair, the difference is about 20%, which is (while sizeable) not that crazy. I'd be interested in knowing if there's a good explanation for that. One potential guess is that people of that age are most familiar with the format of news stories in general (by having the most exposure to them) leading them to pick things out easily.

[@ryanlangman4266]

The problem isn’t that we are living in 2 different universes. We are all living in the same universe, but half of us are looking through blue tinted glasses and the other half through red.
So, we are all seeing the same events, but half of us are told to have a red opinion, and the other half are told the opposite. We don’t see an event and then come to our own red and blue conclusions. The biases in our news sources influence our conclusions and solidify our preexisting biases thereby furthering the political divide.
Does anyone know of a study on the effects of political bias in media on the opinions formed about the events being discussed? I would love to see if the evidence supports or contradicts my conclusions.

[@elia8544]

Another problem is that “red” and “blue” aren’t the only political viewpoints. There are a whole variety of complicated views yet they aren’t represented by our outdated two party system.

[@gvalentin5464]

Hi Econimate! Thanks for the great video, as usual. Very small issue with the graph at 5:11. The scale not starting at 0 makes the difference look way bigger than it actually is, and nearly led me to believe the difference was 20-30%. But otherwise, thank you for your continuously brilliant work, I hope you soon get the growth you deserve!

[@VictorAntares]

@6:47 i don't agree with this - politicians would be more incentivized to cater to, no neglect, less informed groups since they would be easier to lie to without being held accountable. additionally, the less informed groups also seem to constitute a larger share of the electorate. i think we see examples of this in contemporary politics

[@petithor]

A GRAPH STARTS AT 0