ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades, changes in media technology, in the ecology of media, and in the political environment defied many of the assumptions that laid at the core of political effects research a generation ago. The chapter describes four main such developments: the return of partisan media and the polarization of the political environment, the spread of social media, the vast use of misinformation in politics, and the blurring boundaries between news and other genres. Despite these changes in the environment, many of the individual-level predictions of previous theories seem to remain accurate, albeit with very different macro-level implications.
