The Consequences of Mistrust in the News Media: Media Skepticism as a Moderator in Media Effects and as a Factor Influencing News Media Exposure

Survey data show that audience trust in the institutions of the news media is fading. Most research to date has focused on the reasons for this decline in audience trust and ignored its outcomes. This dissertation seeks to explore the consequences of audience skepticism toward media institutions. Specifically, it hypothesizes that mistrust in the media serves as a moderator for media effects and as a factor influencing media exposure selections. Both propositions were tested on five separate large sample data sets, including the National Election Study of 19%, General Social Survey, and three additional studies conducted at the Anneberg School for Communication during the 19% and 2000 election years. The first proposition was tested in relation to news media agenda setting, spiral of silence, cultivation and priming effects. Findings show that media skepticism indeed moderated agenda setting and spiral of silence processes. Hypotheses about the moderating role of media skepticism in cultivation and priming were not supported. Tests of the second proposition regarding the influence of media skepticism on news exposure selections showed skepticism to be negatively related to exposure to iv mainstream news channels, but positively related to exposure to non-mainstream channels like Political Talk Radio and Internet news sources. Also, media skepticism interacted with need for cognition in their effects on mainstream media exposure, so that the effects of skepticism were stronger when need for cognition was low. Implications of the findings for media scholars, for journalists and for media literacy programs are discussed

Going Beyond General Media Trust: An Analysis of Topical Media Trust, its Antecedents and Effects on Issue (Mis)perceptions

A key problem with research on news media trust is that it has mostly focused on general media trust and that there is limited research on how media trust might vary across levels of analysis. In this paper, we seek to remedy this by investigating whether news media trust differs depending on the topic of news coverage and whether topical trust can be distinguished from general media trust. We also investigate the antecedents of trust in news coverage of different topics and the effects of topical trust on issue (mis)perceptions. Among other things, findings show that topical media trust can be distinguished from general media trust and is a better predictor of correct perceptions on political matters

Robustness analyses

For peer-revie

What Does Fake Look Like? A Review of the Literature on Intentional Deception in the News and on Social Media

This paper focuses on the content features of intentional deceptive information in the news (i.e., fake news) and on social media. Based on an extensive review of relevant literature (i.e., political journalism and communication, computational linguistics), we take stock of existing knowledge and present an overview of the structural characteristics that are indicative of intentionally deceptive information. We discuss the strength of underlying empirical evidence and identify underdeveloped areas of research. With this paper, we aim to contribute to the systematic study of intentional deception in the news and on social media and to help setting up new lines of research in which intentionally deceptive news items can be operationalized in consistent ways

KR - Equivalence framing

A study of effects of equivalence framing on perceived credibility of statistical statement