Media Consumption and Political Ideology

Laura McNeal: What's the matter, won't the pieces fit together?
P.J. McNeal: Some of them, but they make the wrong picture.
Laura McNeal: Pieces never make the wrong picture. Maybe you're looking at them from the wrong angle.
--Call Northside 777

Interesting study by Pew Research Center on media consumption of political ideologies as modeled by the unidimensional 'left/right' scale. Several accompanying charts visually display the differences in media preferences between left and right.

Top media outlets:

Trust/distrust of various media outlets:

Pew also placed various media outlets on a scale according to the average political ideology of a respondent who got information from the outlet in the last week:

It strikes me how closely the positioning of media outlets here, particularly the skew, compares to Groseclose and Milyo's (2005) slant quotients.

The findings here are consistent with the proposition that individuals prefer to consume media that reinforces, rather than challenges, their ideological beliefs.