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Slate's Web Tool Tells How Isolated or Open-Minded Your Politics Are

by Amar Toor on May 1, 2010 at 05:00 PM

Last week, we discussed the findings of a recent paper by Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro, who examined the news-reading tendencies of liberal and conservative Web surfers. In their study, Gentzkow and Shapiro found that, contrary to popular belief, liberals actually spend a considerable amount of time on news sites traditionally labeled as conservative, and vice versa.

Slate has come up with its own program to help readers figure out how isolated or open-minded they are when it comes to their own online media consumption behavior. Clicking the 'Profile Me' button will let Slate analyze your browsing history and search for all the news sites you've recently visited. Then, using the same ranking system that Gentzkow and Shapiro employed in their article, the site will determine your level of 'isolation'. Slate is quick to point out that the entire process remains totally anonymous and that it won't download your browsing history -- all it does is glance through your trail to see if you've visited any of the sites on its predetermined list. The only information saved is your overall score, which is used to compare to other Slate readers.

Much like the original study, there's an inherent limit to what you can take away from Slate's statistical breakdown. The methodology, after all, doesn't take into account the time you spend on a particular site, and only considers the fact that you've visited a particular home page at least once. Of course, there's no way to tell whether or not a liberal browser is reading Fox News in order to get a different spin on a story, or simply to reinforce faith in his own opinion. Ultimately, the question of intent is something that can only be answered on an individual level. But Slate's new metric does afford us the rare opportunity to look at our own media consumption behavior face to face, and, at the very least, provides us with a baseline from which we can construct our own personal rationalization. [From: Slate]

Tags: behavior, bias, conservatives, fox news, FoxNews, liberals, media, media consumption, MediaConsumption, news, slate, statistics, top

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