News Finding: For example, the inaccurate claim about Romney's role at Bain Capital would have benefited the Democratic presidential candidate if it was true, yet a typical citizen who did not use liberal sites had a 47 percent chance of being "unsure" what fact checkers had concluded.
Paper Finding: That leaves one last effect of biased outlet exposure that could promote ideologically favorable misperceptions.
News Context: "In fact, we found modest evidence that the opposite sometimes occurs - people who were heavy users of ideological news sites were more likely to say they'd heard evidence related to one of the issues," he said. For example, the inaccurate claim about Romney's role at Bain Capital would have benefited the Democratic presidential candidate if it was true, yet a typical citizen who did not use liberal sites had a 47 percent chance of being "unsure" what fact checkers had concluded. A heavy user of liberal sites had only an 18 percent chance of being unsure of the facts.
Paper Context: Summarizing the results so far, data are consistent with the assertion that ideologically oriented websites do shape users' understanding of evidence surrounding some contested political facts, but the effect is modest in magnitude and limited in scope. That leaves one last effect of biased outlet exposure that could promote ideologically favorable misperceptions. Here again descriptive data are compelling: 90.3% of Democrats who know what journalists believe about President Obama's birthplace have reached this conclusion themselves, while only 66.7% of Republicans who accurately perceive journalists' positions do the same.