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In this note we introduce a new approach to measure media alignment derived from the story-sharing behavior of journalists. We use a large corpus of online news stories from two leading Hungarian news sites and estimate alignment scores for a large number of outlets that they cite. To the extent that journalists are more likely to cite ideologically proximate sources, our measure can be used to compare a large number of media outlets on a political — in our case government vs. independent — space. We demonstrate the use of this approach with two empirical applications. First, we show that our alignment scores successfully capture known ideological variation across outlets at a single point in time. Second, we demonstrate that quarterly estimates of alignment for a captured outlet change dramatically following an abrupt change in ownership.

We report the results of an intervention that targeted anti-Roma sentiment in Hungary using an online perspective-taking game. We evaluated the impact of this intervention using a randomized experiment in which a sample of young adults played this perspective-taking game, or an unrelated online game. Participation in the perspective-taking game markedly reduced prejudice, with an effect-size equivalent to half the difference between voters of the far-right and the center-right party. The effects persisted for at least a month, and, as a byproduct, the intervention also reduced antipathy toward refugees, another stigmatized group in Hungary, and decreased vote intentions for Hungary's overtly racist, far-right party by 10%. Our study offers a proof-of-concept for a general class of interventions that could be adapted to different settings and implemented at low costs.