News bias perceptions as impacted by source cues, content cues, and media bias ratings

Using three experimental studies, this research considers whether exposure to source cues, content cues, and media bias ratings impacts perceptions of ideological bias in news stories. As a possible news media literacy intervention strategy, viewing a media bias ratings chart after reading a news story had limited influence on assessments of bias. Source cues consistently influenced bias perceptions. Study 1 and Study 2 revealed evidence of the relative hostile media perception, where Republicans and Democrats perceived the news stories as biased in the same direction but to a significantly different degree. This finding did not replicate in Study 3, where content cues were held constant. Thus, content cues, alongside source cues, appear necessary in facilitating the relative hostile media perception.</p

First-Person Effects of Emotional and Informational Messages in Strategic Environmental Communications Campaigns

<p>This study examined the first- and third-person effects of emotional and informational messages, particularly relating to the critical issue areas of energy, the environment, and global warming. Due to intense political polarization on such issues, it also explored the role of political party identification. The results of an experiment indicated that informational messages about the environment produced third-person effects, while environmental advertisements meant to evoke emotion caused first-person effects. Moreover, emotional environmental advertisements appealed more to Republicans and those who did not support a political party. As such, indirect, emotional messages appear to represent an opportunity for strategic environmental communicators to design campaigns that resonate with potentially unreceptive audiences.</p