Does Listening to Trustworthy News Affect Political Attitudes and Trust?

Despite the increasing popularity of podcasts as a source of news for many Americans, little is known about their precise impact. We conduct a mobile field experiment that examines how consumption of trustworthy news via daily podcasts affects attitudes about politics and the media over a one-week period. Our treatment, deployed at the end of the first of two survey waves, asks subjects to subscribe to a specific high-quality daily news podcast, NPR’s Up First. In addition, treated subjects are asked to turn on mobile push notifications for the podcast. The intervention successfully increased participants’ consumption of news from the podcast, with minimal substitution from other programs. We find that podcast consumption significantly increased event knowledge ( d = 0.29 ), but only for topics covered in that week’s episodes. Trust specifically in news from podcasts also increased ( d = 0.09 ), but not in mainstream news more generally. Our results shed light on outcomes linked to the unique possibilities of this medium and, more broadly, on the malleability of attitudes toward the media.