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American Economic Review

ISSN 0002-8282 (Print) | ISSN 1944-7981 (Online)

Is Journalistic Truth Dead? Measuring How Informed Voters Are about Political News

  • Charles Angelucci
  • Andrea Prat
American Economic Review
vol. 114, no. 4, April 2024
(pp. 887–925)
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Abstract

To investigate general patterns in news information in the United States, we combine a protocol for identifying major political news stories, 11 monthly surveys with 15,000 participants, and a model of news discernment. When confronted with a true and a fake news story, 47 percent of subjects confidently choose the true story, 3 percent 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, but its impact is up to an order of magnitude smaller.

Citation

Angelucci, Charles, and Andrea Prat. 2024. "Is Journalistic Truth Dead? Measuring How Informed Voters Are about Political News." American Economic Review, 114 (4): 887–925. DOI: 10.1257/aer.20211003

Additional Materials

JEL Classification

  • D72 Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
  • D83 Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
  • L82 Entertainment; Media