We Avoid News We Don't Like. Some Trump-Era Evidence.

The United States is so polarized that it can seem that Republicans and Democrats choose to exist in two entirely different versions of the day, depending on their media diet. But a new analysis of the web traffic of 148 news organizations shows something subtler: Publications across the political spectrum broadly cover the news events of the day, but their readers appear to gloss over the stories they don’t want to see. That analysis comes from Chartbeat, a web analytics company used by hundreds of online media publishers, including The New York Times. Chartbeat’s real-time dashboards display the articles that are being read most at any given moment, along with where those readers came from and how long they stayed.