All the talk about how online media is trapping people in their own liberal and conservative echo chambers is greatly overstating the impact that internet news has had on our democracy. In an extremely thorough paper, Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro look at ideological segregation both online and offline. Not only is internet news a small part of overall news consumption (about 10%), but it’s also less ideologically segregated than our face to face interactions. Gentzkow and Shapiro construct an isolation index based on the share of conservatives who visit each source of political information and the share of liberals who visit each source of information. The index shows the gap between conservative and liberal for each information medium. Their main results, presented in the graph below, show that while the internet is more polarized than newspapers and television, it’s significantly less polarized than our face-to-face interactions with co-workers…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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