Exposure to Ideological News and Perceived Opinion Climate: Testing the Media Effects Component of Spiral-of-Silence in a Fragmented Media Landscape

Spiral-of-silence theory assumes that a monolithic stream of messages from mainstream media, leaving little ability for audiences to seek ideologically congruent news, affects people’s perceptions of the distribution of opinion in society. While these assumptions may have been valid when Noelle-Neumann developed her theory forty years ago, the new media landscape, characterized by the proliferation of ideological media outlets, makes them seem outdated. Do audiences of conservative-leaning media perceive a conservative opinion climate while audiences of liberal-leaning media perceive a more liberal distribution of opinion? And if so, what are the consequences? We examine these questions using two data sets collected in extremely different contexts (Study 1 in the context of the 2005 Israeli disengagement from Gaza, n = 519; Study 2, in the context of the 2004 U.S. presidential elections using the National Annenberg Election Survey, n = 9,058). In both studies, selective exposure to ideological media outlets was associated with opinion climate perceptions that were biased in the direction of the media outlets’ ideologies. In Study 2, we also demonstrated that partisan selective exposure indirectly contributes to political polarization, and that this effect is mediated by opinion climate perceptions.