Opinion dynamics under antagonistic influences

We study the opinion dynamics of a generalized voter model in which N voters are additionally influenced by two antagonistic news sources. As the influence of these news sources is increased, the mean time to reach consensus scales N^z. The parameter z quantifies the influence of the news sources and increases without bound as the news sources become increasingly influential. The time to reach a politically polarized state, in which roughly equal fractions of the populations are in each opinion state, is generally short, and the steady-state opinion distribution exhibits a transition from near consensus to a politically polarized state as a function of z.