Sakshi Bhalla

Fact checkers have low reach, and their limited efficacy is often attributed to perceived partisanship. Yet little research exists investigating the reach of or engagement with fact checkers among their intended audiences. We argue that given their small audience size, fact checkers' usage is likely driven by heavy media users regardless of partisan leanings. Examining over 7 million Twitter (X) news users across India and the United States, we find exposure to and engagement with fact checkers remains largely restricted to heavier users, with little evidence that interventions penetrate selectively partisan news audiences.

Interviews with 20 educators reveal divides in media worlds, school resources, and political context that shape how media literacy is taught and experienced, highlighting the need for bottom-up approaches to improve outcomes.

We propose the "news as entertainment" framework to explain how commercial dynamics shape news consumption and why misinformation persists despite corrections. Using India's information environment as a strategic case, we show how competing social and economic interests in a high-choice, polarized context influence exposure and receptivity to corrections.

Using the September 2019 climate strikes in Delhi and Bengaluru, we examine how Twitter activity intertwined with local social-capital networks in a digital-first movement. We show that the role of Twitter can only be understood alongside on-the-ground organizing.

Polarization can be built into the structure of a media system itself, not only into what any individual chooses to follow. This study looks at India's news environment through a network of 485 prominent journalists and their 32 million followers on X, asking whether the cues that shape who follows whom — geographic location, organizational affiliation, media format, and content similarity — track the country's political divide or cut across it. It treats journalists, not outlets, as the unit of analysis, and uses Additive and Multiplicative Effects models of the resulting co-following network. These cues do not all behave the same way. Geographic location organizes attention along a line that runs largely independent of ideology, holding up even among journalists with nothing else in common politically. Organizational affiliation and media format track the divide much more closely, and format's pull toward polarized clustering only weakens, and even reverses, among the most established legacy journalists. Even a cue with no obvious ideological content can end up organizing political sorting. Polarization, this suggests, can be built into the architecture of the media system, not only into individual choice.

Counties that look alike on every characteristic known to predict newspaper viability can differ several-fold in how widely their papers circulate. Much of that difference tracks their surroundings. Drawing on circulation data for 3,108 counties in the contiguous United States and spatial econometric models, this study finds that the penetration of newspapers in a county is associated with the circulation of the counties bordering it. The relationship persists after conditioning on county demographics, partisanship, turnout, market concentration, and the wider media environment, as well as on those same characteristics measured across a county's neighbors. The conditions that sustain a local newspaper therefore extend past the county it serves. Since the association is positive, it runs in both directions. That is, well supplied counties adjoin one another, and so do counties whose papers reach few households. News deserts, on this evidence, are less a tally of independent market failures than the local expression of a regional condition. This bears on the scale at which the erosion of local news is measured and addressed.