ABSTRACT

Although media and communication scholars have suggested various analytical methods for measuring and comparing news audience polarization across countries, we lack a systematic assessment of the metrics produced by these techniques. Using survey data from the 2016 Reuters Institute Digital News Report on news use in 26 countries, we address this gap through a resampling simulation experiment. Our simulation revealed a strong impact of analytical choices, which invited disparate interpretations in terms of how polarized news audiences are, how strongly audience polarization structurally varies between news environments, and how news audience polarization is distributed cross-nationally. Alternative choices led to profound differences in the compatibility, consistency, and validity of the empirical news audience polarization estimates. We conclude from these results that a more precise methodological understanding of news audience polarization metrics informs our capability to draw meaningful inferences from empirical work.

摘要

尽管媒体和传播学者提出了各种分析方法来衡量和比较各国新闻受众的两极分化，但我们缺乏对这些技术产生的指标的系统评估。我们使用 2016 年路透社数字新闻报告中关于 26 个国家/地区的新闻使用情况的调查数据，通过重采样模拟实验解决了这一差距。我们的模拟揭示了分析选择的强大影响，这在新闻受众的两极分化程度、新闻环境之间受众的两极分化结构变化程度以及新闻受众的两极分化如何在全国范围内分布等方面引起了不同的解释。替代选择导致经验性新闻受众两极分化估计的兼容性、一致性和有效性存在巨大差异。