Research & Sources
Curated research on media economics, platform design, polarization, and social trust. Every statistic used in the book traces to a primary source.
Primary sources
- Gallup (2025) — Public trust in U.S. mass media fell from 68% (1972) to 28% (2025).
- Vosoughi, Roy & Aral, Science (MIT) (2018-03) — False news on Twitter was ~70% more likely to be retweeted than true news and reached the first 1,500 people roughly six times faster.
- Nightingale & Farid, PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) (2022-02) — Humans detect AI-generated faces at only 59% accuracy even after training with feedback, statistically near chance.
- PRRI, 2019 American Values Survey (2019-10) — 45% of Democrats and 35% of Republicans said they would be unhappy if their child married someone from the other political party.
- Pew Research Center, partisan hostility tracking (2022-08) — The share of Americans viewing the opposing party as a threat to the nation more than doubled between the mid-1990s and 2022.
- Future of Music Coalition, "Radio Deregulation: Has It Served Citizens and Musicians?" (2006-12) — After the Telecommunications Act of 1996 removed the national radio ownership cap, Clear Channel Communications grew from roughly 40 stations in 1995 to more than 1,200 by 2005, the specific consolidation the ownership-cap change made possible.
- Pew Research Center, Public Trust in Government 1958-2025 (2025-09) — Trust in the federal government to do what is right most of the time or just about always fell from 73% in 1958 to 17% in 2025.
- Gallup, Party Affiliation annual aggregate (2026-01) — A record 45% of Americans identified as political independents in 2025, against 27% Republican and 27% Democratic.
- Gallup, Confidence in Institutions (2026-07) — Average confidence across 14 major U.S. institutions stood at 27% in 2026, near the 26% record low set in 2023.
- Gallup, Confidence in Institutions (2026-07) — The partisan gap in average confidence in major U.S. institutions stood at 13 points in 2026, as wide as any gap in nearly five decades of measurement.
- U.S. Census Bureau, Voting and Registration (Table A-1) (2025) — Reported voter turnout among U.S. citizens age 18 and over was 59.3% in 2024, down from 61.3% in 2020.
- More in Common, The Perception Gap (2019-06) — Partisans estimate that 55% of the other side holds extreme views. The measured share is about 30%.