If the media is to be believed, the US public has a tenuous at best grasp on accurate political news. They’re either consuming disinformation and fake news on social media or following biasedly inaccurate news outlets. Either journalistic truth is as good as dead or we’re living in separate informational universes. But is this too alarmist, could the real story be more nuanced?

That’s what Columbia professor of economics Andrea Prat finds in his recent paper “Is Journalistic Truth Dead? Measuring How Informed Voters Are About Political News”. But what are we to make of these results, and how do we square them with claims of political polarization?