Press Secretary Sean Spicer, at the press briefing room of the White House, delivered a statement while a television screen showed a picture of President Trump's inauguration. Doug Mills/The New York Times

The United States is so polarized that it can seem that Republicans and Democrats choose to exist in two entirely different versions of the day, depending on their media diet.

But a new analysis of the web traffic of 148 news organizations shows something subtler: Publications across the political spectrum broadly cover the news events of the day, but their readers appear to gloss over the stories they don’t want to see.

That analysis comes from Chartbeat, a web analytics company used by hundreds of online media publishers, including The New York Times. Chartbeat’s real-time dashboards display the articles that are being read most at any given moment, along with where those readers came from and how long they stayed. Because so many organizations use the service, Chartbeat has insight into overall news traffic that few other companies have.

At The Upshot’s request, two media researchers from Chartbeat, Sonya Song and Jeiran Jahani, conducted a small study of sorts. Using a measure of the political views of readers, the researchers divided news organizations into two groups: those tending to have more liberal readers and those with more conservative readers. (Many large news organizations, including The Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg and Reuters, are counted as having more liberal readers by this measure; more detailed tables are displayed at the bottom of this article.) The researchers then studied how many articles, on average, organizations in both groups published about a given news event, along with the amount of time their readers spent with these stories.

Think of it as a study of supply and demand: How many articles were news organizations supplying about a given event, and what was the demand like among their readers, measured by the total amount of time they spent with those articles? (Here, time spent is represented in “engaged days” – the length of time an article was open and actively being read.)

The analysis from Chartbeat suggests that supply was generally consistent across the ideological spectrum, but demand was not.

Conservative readers seemed to avoid some stories

Donald J. Trump described his inauguration crowd as the largest ever

Kellyanne Conway lamented lack of coverage of a “Bowling Green Massacre”

Two recent news events illustrate this clearly: President Trump’s false claim that his inauguration was the largest in history and Kellyanne Conway’s false claim of a “Bowling Green Massacre” by Iraqi refugees. (She acknowledged and corrected her mistake on Twitter.) Outlets with conservative readers did publish articles about these events, but their readers spent comparatively little time with them. Why?

One reason could be that those by outlets with more liberal readers were simply more engaging. As any visitor to a range of political news sites can attest, there can be tremendous range in voice depending where you look. Writing about the crowds at Mr. Trump’s inauguration, one headline at the Daily Kos, an organization with strongly liberal readers, said: “Trump's people can't stop lying about crowd size. Or, as they call it, offering 'alternative facts.' ”

On the other end of the ideological spectrum, The Daily Caller’s headline reflected the administration’s perspective: “Sean Spicer Rips the Media for Lying About Crowd Sizes at Trump’s Inauguration.” (While both organizations appear to use Chartbeat to some extent, it’s unclear whether these examples were included in its analysis because of privacy agreements it has with the companies.)

Or news organizations may have published similar articles but differed greatly in their promotional efforts on the homepages of their sites or on their social media accounts. This would effectively limit the visibility, and therefore reach, of their stories, producing a trend like the one seen here.

But another explanation is simpler, and consistent with decades of research in psychology: People don’t like to hear bad news. “Generally, people prefer information consistent with their beliefs, views and prior behaviors, and avoid information that’s inconsistent,” said James Shepperd, a professor of psychology at the University of Florida who has written extensively on information avoidance.

Examples of this behavior abound in everyday life. You may not want to see the results of a biopsy, know your grade after a difficult final exam or look at your credit card bill after a spending binge. One study of Belgian and Dutch soccer fans found that readers were significantly less interested in online news about their favorite team after a loss. Losers tend to “cut off reflected failure” (CORF) while winners prefer “basking in reflected glory” (BIRG). Regardless of our political views, all of us CORF and BIRG to some extent, and online political news is no exception.

“Everybody avoids information,” Mr. Shepperd said.

With other topics, supply and demand were more evenly proportioned. Below, the researchers’ findings for four other news stories, including two nonpolitical ones.

Other times, readers read in roughly similar proportions

Executive order barring immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries

The resignation of Michael Flynn

Super Bowl LI

The Grammy Awards

Below are “alignment measurements” of what people who identify as Democrats or Republicans tended to read most often. They do not indicate a measurement of news organizations’ coverage or “slant.” A -1 indicates a strongly liberal readership, and 1 a strongly conservative readership. Not all of these organizations are necessarily clients of Chartbeat.