Pinar Yildrim Abstract

Title: Ideological Segregation in Streaming Media

Authors: Pinar Yildirim, Greg Martin and Juan Andres Russy

Abstract: Individuals’ daily consumption of streaming TV and entertainment content has grown multifold over the last decade, substituting for the time allocated to more traditional forms of media content, including news programming. The increased consumption of entertainment media is shaping the social, political, and economic issues viewers are exposed to, and altering their views about not only what issues to think about, but also possibly how to think about these issues. We study whether the partisan sorting that characterizes news consumption extends to consumption of entertainment media, and whether entertainment content shapes political attitudes in turn. Combining household- level viewership records for U.S. households and streaming titles from Nexxen, we construct a political-alignment index for each household based on their news media viewing patterns. Three findings emerge. First, entertainment audiences sort across individual titles, but less than news audiences do.  Second, although audiences are mixed, the content the two sides consume still shows differences; partisan phrases cluster into thematically coherent narrative domains rather than a political vocabulary. Third, exploiting a combination of weather and release day shocks to viewership, we show that county-level show exposure results in changes in political, economic and social attitudes relevant to the themes covered in the shows. These findings show that entertainment media consumption spans across partisan lines, carries wide-ranging thematic content, and contributes to the shift in attitudes, separately from the influence of consumption of news.