Online Media Outlets Struggle to Represent Audiences in a Two-Dimensional Ideological Landscape

A well-established literature finds that media outlets align their ideological positions with those of their audiences. However, can outlets do this in a two-dimensional (economic/cultural) ideological landscape? This is among the most common and parsimonious models of ideology within political science. I predict that outlets under-represent cross-pressured voters (CPVs) -- people with leftist economic positions and conservative cultural positions ("left-conservatives") or the reverse ("right-progressives"). Despite large CPV populations, I argue that outlets are constrained from representing them by the structures of media actors and party systems. I construct a novel corpus of one million articles. These are quasi-randomly selected from the universe of Anglophone internet media articles. Using large language models and a new ideological classification technique, this study measures the separate economic and cultural positions of 324 prominent media outlets from 26 countries. This data provides interesting descriptive results about the two-dimensional positions of these outlets overall and across time. Moreover, the study then tests (1) the relationship between the economic and cultural dimensions, (2) how this structure changes over time, and (3) its association with audience ideological structure. The results indicate that many media outlets are unrepresentative and unresponsive to audiences in a two-dimensional ideological landscape. This has important implications for our understanding of media ideology in general and media effects among CPVs.