About one-fifth of Democrats and Republicans get political news in a kind of media bubble

While Pew Research Center’s recent report on media polarization and the 2020 election found that many Democrats and Republicans differ from each other in their sources of news, about one-fifth of those in each party are in a more isolated kind of media bubble – getting political news in a given week only from outlets predominantly used by people who align with them politically, according to data from the Center’s Election News Pathways project. Respondents were asked if they got political and election news in the past week from 30 different sources representing a range of news media across different platforms. Based on this data, researchers calculated the political composition of each source’s audience. (See here for details about the ideological composition of news outlets’ audiences.)