The Paradox of Consumer Demand for Under-informative News

The U.S. news media have long been criticized for reflexive use of conflict narratives and horse-race coverage in political coverage. Media organizations and some scholars argue that these approaches can broaden their audience and entice some relatively disinterested consumers to engage with political news. I argue that approaches instead deepen engagement from a narrow subset of the public, while failing to engage audiences that are less interested in politics. I provide empirical evidence of this dynamic with a preregistered conjoint experiment conducted with a national nonprobability sample (n = 2,101), in which I ask respondents to make news consumption decisions between pairs of headlines (n = 19,081) that vary in style, policy issue, topic, and source. I find that "public interest" style headlines that convey the public import of news stories in plain language are preferred by less politically engaged consumers, whereas highly politically engaged consumers prefer headlines that use conflict frames, specialized political jargon, forecasting predictions, or clickbait language. While news outlets have financial incentives to cater to the most engaged consumers, this study suggests that doing so may in fact drive away less engaged consumers, while simultaneously threatening democratic accountability mechanisms by producing news that is ultimately less informative.