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Abstract
This study investigated the causes of individuals’ perceived news bias in an authoritarian press system—Singapore. We proposed two explanations for individuals’ perception of news article slant: the judgment-heuristic explanation and the attitude-influenced explanation. The judgment-heuristic explanation suggests that people's perception of media characteristics, rather than the actual news content, would affect their judgment of news bias. The attitude-influenced explanation, on the other hand, suggests that people's issue involvement and attitudes towards the issue may influence how they process news information and ultimately affect their evaluation of news article slant. Both explanations received support in this study. We also found that media source, audiences’ personal opinion, and their issue involvement would interact and produce joint effects on audiences’ judgment of news article slant.
Notes
1. We also attempted to recruit activists from both gay and Christian communities but we failed to do so because it was difficult to access these two communities.
2. Readers can address correspondence to the first author to obtain the stimulus article.
3. The response scale for the revised outcome-relevant involvement is a seven-point scale ranging from no impact to considerable impact.
4. The Pearson correlations among the three involvement variables ranged from 0.23 to 0.43. We also performed the regression analyses for three separate times. Each time we entered only one type of issue involvement as the independent variable. The results are similar to the regression results with three types of issue involvement entered as independent variables altogether.
