More Inclusive, Less Attentive: How Digital Intermediaries Expand News Audiences but Facilitate Inequalities in News Attentiveness

Digital intermediaries—such as social media, search engines, and aggregators—offer additional pathways for accessing news. However, their impact on inequalities in news consumption, or the distribution of news exposure across the population, remains underexplored. We address this gap by analyzing how distributed access through intermediaries affects news inequalities in two dimensions: compared with direct access, distributed access shows a reduction in news access disparities among diverse demographic groups (first-dimension inequality); however, we also find that news attentiveness is lower for news sessions through intermediaries, and users who rely on intermediaries to access news exhibit less cumulative news exposure than those leveraging direct news access over an extended period (second-dimension inequality). Meanwhile, variations are observed among different intermediaries: social media exhibits smaller access gaps among demographic groups compared with search engines. However, users accumulate less news exposure over time when leveraging social media for news compared to search engines. These findings emphasize the two-dimensional paradox of news inequalities.