A few weeks ago, I had a post on the relationship between people's main source of news and their opinions on three questions--whether Trump's victory in 2024 was legitimate, whether Biden's victory in 2020 was legitimate, and whether there was fraud in the 2024 election. I reduced those three variables to two--% thinking Trump's victory was legitimate minus % thinking Biden's was; and % thinking Trump's victory was legitimate plus % thinking Biden's was + % thinking that there was not widespread fraud in 2024. The first can be thought of as Democratic vs. Republican orientation and the second as general confidence in or cynicism about the political process. There was no consistent difference between consumers of new and traditional media in Democratic vs. Republican orientation, but consumers of all the new media sources were high in cynicism.
The survey also contained the following question: "A dictator is a leader who has total power over a country, with no checks and balances. Do you think (Donald) Trump will try to rule as a dictator or not?" Overall, 40% said he would, 41% that he wouldn't, and 19% weren't sure. Breaking that down by reported source of news:
The x-axis shows the average confidence/cynicism score for audiences of the different sources; new media outlets are in blue and the traditional ones are in red. People who got their news from new media sources didn't think it was very likely that he would try to become a dictator. Of course, views are also related to Democratic/Republican orientation. I adjusted for this got the following figure:
The audiences that were more cynical (Trump not legitimate plus Biden not plus fraud in 2024) were less likely to think that Trump would try to rule as a dictator. Another way to say this is that if you regress percent thinking that Trump would try to rule as a dictator on Democratic/Republican and confident/cynical orientation, both had strong and about equal effects, but confidence rather than cynicism goes with belief that Trump would try to rule as a dictator, which is the opposite of what I would have predicted. Why do we have this relationship? I would say that cynicism is associated with a sense that this is all "just politics": people said that about Biden, Obama, Bush.... so there's no reason to be especially worried now.
Going back to the issue of new versus traditional media, I think this is the main problem with the new media: not that it has a bias towards the right, but that it leads to a sense of confusion and doubt. Or putting it another way, whatever their faults, the traditional media provide a structure for interpreting the news and have some kind of agreement about more and less reliable sources.
Note: this is all about the average views of groups defined by reported source of news, since I don't have the individual-level data. Of course, this isn't necessarily the same as the individual-level relationship, but I think it's still meaningful in this case.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
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