scholarly journals Partisan motivated reasoning and misinformation in the media: Is news from ideologically uncongenial sources more suspicious?

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 129-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Clayton ◽  
Jase Davis ◽  
Kristen Hinckley ◽  
Yusaku Horiuchi
Keyword(s):  
Motivated Reasoning ◽  
News Article ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Fox News ◽  
News Reports ◽  
News Source ◽  
The Media ◽  
News Outlet ◽  
Democrats And Republicans ◽  
Source Cues

AbstractIn recent years, concerns about misinformation in the media have skyrocketed. President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that various news outlets are disseminating ‘fake news’ for political purposes. But when the information contained in mainstream media news reports provides no clear clues about its truth value or any indication of a partisan slant, do people rely on the congeniality of the news outlet to judge whether the information is true or false? In a survey experiment, we presented partisans (Democrats and Republicans) and ideologues (liberals and conservatives) with a news article excerpt that varied by source shown (CNN, Fox News, or no source) and content (true or false information), and measured their perceived accuracy of the information contained in the article. Our results suggest that the participants do not blindly judge the content of articles based on the news source, regardless of their own partisanship and ideology. Contrary to prevailing views on the polarization and politicization of news outlets, as well as on voters' growing propensity to engage in ‘partisan motivated reasoning,’ source cues are not as important as the information itself for partisans on both sides of the aisle.

scholarly journals When election expectations fail: Polarized perceptions of election legitimacy increase with accumulating evidence of election outcomes and with polarized media

PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (12) ◽  
pp. e0259473
Author(s):  
Marrissa D. Grant ◽  
Alexandra Flores ◽  
Eric J. Pedersen ◽  
David K. Sherman ◽  
Leaf Van Boven
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Dissonance ◽  
Positive Emotions ◽  
Negative Emotions ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fox News ◽  
The Media ◽  
Democrats And Republicans ◽  
Dissonance Theory ◽  
Over Time

The present study, conducted immediately after the 2020 presidential election in the United States, examined whether Democrats’ and Republicans’ polarized assessments of election legitimacy increased over time. In a naturalistic survey experiment, people (N = 1,236) were randomly surveyed either during the week following Election Day, with votes cast but the outcome unknown, or during the following week, after President Joseph Biden was widely declared the winner. The design unconfounded the election outcome announcement from the vote itself, allowing more precise testing of predictions derived from cognitive dissonance theory. As predicted, perceived election legitimacy increased among Democrats, from the first to the second week following Election Day, as their expected Biden win was confirmed, whereas perceived election legitimacy decreased among Republicans as their expected President Trump win was disconfirmed. From the first to the second week following Election Day, Republicans reported stronger negative emotions and weaker positive emotions while Democrats reported stronger positive emotions and weaker negative emotions. The polarized perceptions of election legitimacy were correlated with the tendencies to trust and consume polarized media. Consumption of Fox News was associated with lowered perceptions of election legitimacy over time whereas consumption of other outlets was associated with higher perceptions of election legitimacy over time. Discussion centers on the role of the media in the experience of cognitive dissonance and the implications of polarized perceptions of election legitimacy for psychology, political science, and the future of democratic society.

scholarly journals SHIFTS IN THE MEDIA TECHNOLOGY LANDSCAPE: THE EFFECTS, CHALLENGES, AND FUTURE OF THE WORLD OF JOURNALISM

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (14) ◽  
pp. 184-195
Author(s):  
Jamilah Hamzah ◽  
Khairunnisa Kamal Azi ◽  
Nurul Hidayah Hamid ◽  
Wan Mohd Noor Hafiz Wan Mansor ◽  
Norsiah Abdul Hamid
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Media Technology ◽  
Broadcast Media ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The World ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Media ◽  
Depth Interviews

The advent of the Internet in Malaysia in 1998 has changed the world of journalism from conventional to digital. For that, all journalists need to be prepared with various skills in order to meet the needs of the current audience so as not to be left behind. However, not all journalists are ready to face the changes that occur in the world of journalism which require them to handle various tasks simultaneously (multitasking) either in terms of writing news, taking photos, and editing videos. This study uses in-depth interviews involving eight print journalists and broadcast comprising Malays, Chinese, and Indians in two states in Malaysia with more than 10 years of experience in journalism. The objective of the study is to examine journalists' views on the world of journalism, among others in terms of skills, technology, challenges, and future. The findings of the study found that journalists, regardless of print or broadcast media are now facing major challenges in maintaining the printing industry, especially with declining sales in the market. The results of the study also show that all media agencies are now actively transitioning from conventional to digital media to prepare journalists and enable the mainstream media to remain relevant in this industry. The findings also revealed that competition from social media platforms has seen media agencies exploiting the platform to compete accordingly in providing ethical news reports with regards to their 'house-style' as well as guided by authentic sources.

scholarly journals Network Propaganda

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yochai Benkler ◽  
Robert Farris ◽  
Hal Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Coming Out ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
Fox News ◽  
The Media ◽  
Political Media ◽  
Political Spectrum

This book examines the shape, composition, and practices of the United States political media landscape. It explores the roots of the current epistemic crisis in political communication with a focus on the remarkable 2016 U.S. president election culminating in the victory of Donald Trump and the first year of his presidency. The authors present a detailed map of the American political media landscape based on the analysis of millions of stories and social media posts, revealing a highly polarized and asymmetric media ecosystem. Detailed case studies track the emergence and propagation of disinformation in the American public sphere that took advantage of structural weaknesses in the media institutions across the political spectrum. This book describes how the conservative faction led by Steve Bannon and funded by Robert Mercer was able to inject opposition research into the mainstream media agenda that left an unsubstantiated but indelible stain of corruption on the Clinton campaign. The authors also document how Fox News deflects negative coverage of President Trump and has promoted a series of exaggerated and fabricated counter narratives to defend the president against the damaging news coming out of the Mueller investigation. Based on an analysis of the actors that sought to influence political public discourse, this book argues that the current problems of media and democracy are not the result of Russian interference, behavioral microtargeting and algorithms on social media, political clickbait, hackers, sockpuppets, or trolls, but of asymmetric media structures decades in the making. The crisis is political, not technological.

The Evolving Role of Social Media as News Outlet: Opportunities and Threats

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-57
Author(s):  
Cendera Rizky Bangun
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
New Media ◽  
Group Discussion ◽  
Generation Gap ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
News Source ◽  
The Media ◽  
To Come ◽  
News Outlet

As new media emerge and replace the popularity of conventional media, people use social media not only as medium to socialize, but also increase its role as news source or news outlet. A generational divide has always existed within news. The older people tend to choose TV and newspaper as their primary news source meanwhile research conducted by Reuters in 2015 showed that younger audiences that grown up in digital era, exhibiting very different behaviors and increasingly expect the news to come to them through online channels and in new formats. This makes social media become the opportunities and also threats to some news companies. What should the media do in order to survive? Does the generation gap influence the media to use both traditional and digital or social media? Some online media even put their headlines and link in Facebook and Twitter as news outlet, so people can just click the link and go to their websites. Methodology used in this research is qualitative with data gathered from focus group discussion and interview. The result of the study expected to show how the generation gap creates different media consumption and the need for news corporation to change their pattern in order to survive. Keywords: Social media, news outlet, new media

Believing and sharing misinformation, fact-checks, and accurate information on social media: The role of anxiety during COVID-19

2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482110114
Author(s):  
Isabelle Freiling ◽  
Nicole M Krause ◽  
Dietram A Scheufele ◽  
Dominique Brossard
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Experimental Design ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Motivated Reasoning ◽  
Accurate Information ◽  
Driving Factor ◽  
Fox News ◽  
News Outlet ◽  
High Uncertainty

The COVID-19 pandemic went hand in hand with what some have called a “(mis)infodemic” about the virus on social media. Drawing on partisan motivated reasoning and partisan selective sharing, this study examines the influence of political viewpoints, anxiety, and the interactions of the two on believing and willingness to share false, corrective, and accurate claims about COVID-19 on social media. A large-scale 2 (emotion: anxiety vs relaxation) × 2 (slant of news outlet: MSNBC vs Fox News) experimental design with 719 US participants shows that anxiety is a driving factor in belief in and willingness to share claims of any type. Especially for Republicans, a state of heightened anxiety leads them to believe and share more claims. Our findings expand research on partisan motivated reasoning and selective sharing in online settings, and enhance the understanding of how anxiety shapes individuals’ processing of risk-related claims in issue contexts with high uncertainty.

scholarly journals Fighting misinformation on social media using crowdsourced judgments of news source quality

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (7) ◽  
pp. 2521-2526 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Pennycook ◽  
David G. Rand
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Strongly Correlated ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
News Sources ◽  
News Source ◽  
Media Platform ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
Display Content ◽  
Democrats And Republicans

Reducing the spread of misinformation, especially on social media, is a major challenge. We investigate one potential approach: having social media platform algorithms preferentially display content from news sources that users rate as trustworthy. To do so, we ask whether crowdsourced trust ratings can effectively differentiate more versus less reliable sources. We ran two preregistered experiments (n = 1,010 from Mechanical Turk and n = 970 from Lucid) where individuals rated familiarity with, and trust in, 60 news sources from three categories: (i) mainstream media outlets, (ii) hyperpartisan websites, and (iii) websites that produce blatantly false content (“fake news”). Despite substantial partisan differences, we find that laypeople across the political spectrum rated mainstream sources as far more trustworthy than either hyperpartisan or fake news sources. Although this difference was larger for Democrats than Republicans—mostly due to distrust of mainstream sources by Republicans—every mainstream source (with one exception) was rated as more trustworthy than every hyperpartisan or fake news source across both studies when equally weighting ratings of Democrats and Republicans. Furthermore, politically balanced layperson ratings were strongly correlated (r = 0.90) with ratings provided by professional fact-checkers. We also found that, particularly among liberals, individuals higher in cognitive reflection were better able to discern between low- and high-quality sources. Finally, we found that excluding ratings from participants who were not familiar with a given news source dramatically reduced the effectiveness of the crowd. Our findings indicate that having algorithms up-rank content from trusted media outlets may be a promising approach for fighting the spread of misinformation on social media.

Motivated Fake News Perception: The Impact of News Sources and Policy Support on Audiences’ Assessment of News Fakeness

2020 ◽  
pp. 107769902095212
Author(s):  
Stephanie Jean Tsang
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Motivated Reasoning ◽  
Policy Support ◽  
Fake News ◽  
Online Experiment ◽  
Online Forum ◽  
News Sources ◽  
News Source ◽  
News Outlet ◽  
The Impact

An online experiment ( N = 280) exposed participants in Hong Kong to an anti-police WhatsApp news message during the extradition bill controversy. Although source verification is commonly recommended as a strategy to avoid being deceived by fake news, the findings did not reveal that the news source (legacy news outlet vs. online forum vs. no source) impacted the perceived fakeness of the news message. Nonetheless, participants holding opposing stances were found to perceive the same news message to be fake to significantly varying degrees, providing evidence that motivated reasoning plays in the spread of fake news.

ICERD in Malaysian online news reports: A cross-linguistic comparative corpus analysis

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 51
Author(s):  
Siti Aeisha Joharry ◽  
Nor Diyana Saupi
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Online News ◽  
Corpus Analysis ◽  
Search Term ◽  
International Convention ◽  
Online Newspapers ◽  
News Reports ◽  
The Media ◽  
Online Sources

The International Convention for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), which was not ratified in Malaysia, created a heated public discourse in the media. This cross-linguistic comparative study investigates the representation of ICERD in Malaysian news reports of two online sources in Malaysia – the widely read English portal: The Star Online, and its Malay equivalent: Berita Harian. A corpus-assisted discourse analysis was conducted to examine how news on ‘ICERD’ were reported in both English and Malay online newspapers. Initial comparative analysis of both newspapers revealed that the search term co-occurs statistically more frequently with the verb ‘ratify’ and its equivalent: ‘meratifikasi’. Patterns indicate that ‘ICERD’ was mostly referring to the act of sanctioning the agreement –particularly to ‘not ratify’ or ‘tidak akan meratifikasi’, which is concurrent with the timeframe of events. Interestingly, different patterns can be found in Berita Harian (e.g. the expression of ‘thanks’ or gratitude of not ratifying ICERD) that are not as revealing in The Star Online reports. Some inconsistencies were also reported between the two newspapers, e.g. referring to different ministers’ speech about the initial plan to ratify ICERD alongside five (The Star Online) or six (Berita Harian) other treaties in the following year.  

Conflicting Health-Related Scientific Evidence in News Reports: Effects of Hedging and Presentation Format on Perceived Issue Uncertainty and Scientists’ and Journalists’ Credibility

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hui Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Health Communication ◽  
Scientific Evidence ◽  
The Other ◽  
Presentation Format ◽  
News Article ◽  
Online Experiment ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Conflicting Evidence ◽  
Health Related

Introduction: This study examined effects of two journalistic practices in reporting conflicting scientific evidence, hedging and presentation format, on scientists’ and journalists’ credibility and issue uncertainty. Methods: An online experiment was conducted using students from a western U.S. university. Hedging was manipulated as reporting methodological limitations versus not reporting the limitations in news articles covering the conflict. Presentation format was manipulated as using a single news article to report both sides of the conflict versus using double articles with one side of the conflict in one article and the other side in the other article. Results: The study found that perceived issue uncertainty was higher in hedged news articles than that in non-hedged articles; presentation format did not affect people’s perceived issue uncertainty. For scientists’ credibility (both competence and trustworthiness), this study found that it was lower in the single-article format than that in the double-article format; for journalists’ credibility, this study found that journalists’ trustworthiness in the two formats did not vary, but their competence was lower in the double-article format than that in the single-article format. Conclusion: This study contributes to the field of science and health communication by examining effects of presentation format used in communicating conflicting health-related scientific evidence and by examining effects of communicating scientific limitations in a context where conflicting evidence exists. Keywords: conflicting scientific evidence, hedging, presentation format, scientists’ credibility, journalists’ credibility

Reading the Tea Leaves—the News about the News

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Khadijah Costley White
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Tea Party ◽  
Online Video ◽  
Tea Leaves ◽  
High Ranking ◽  
Fox News ◽  
The Media

This chapter looks at how the media explained, critiqued, and reported on their own role in the branding and coverage of the Tea Party, and what that says about news media function and convergence in a headphone culture. Whether it was a “media war” on Fox News, a reporter’s rant at CNBC, or a defamatory online video triggering the dismissal of a high-ranking Obama appointee for “racism,” one thing was clear—at its core, Tea Party news narratives were also a story about modern journalism. This section of the book explains how members of the news media portrayed (implicitly and explicitly) their own roles, functions, and values as they advanced the Tea Party’s recognition, messaging, and growth through the logics, action, and discourse of branding.

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