Measuring News Consumption With Behavioral Versus Survey Data

Surveys are a vital tool in understanding public opinion and knowledge, but self-reported behavior in surveys generally leads to inaccurate estimations. We explore a popular and important behavior frequently estimated with surveys: news consumption. Previous studies have shown that television news consumption is consistently over-reported in surveys relative to passively collected behavioral data. We show that the bias also exists in estimates of online and social media–based news consumption, and in estimates of trends. Further, we show that behavioral data can address a wider range of research questions. Although behavioral data are not perfect ground-truth, they are more accurate and useful than survey data in this capacity. We outline a framework for using a mix of behavioral and survey-generated attitudinal data to accurately estimate consumption of news and related effects on public opinion and knowledge, conditional on actual media consumption.