The Power of a Genre: Political News Presented as Fact-Checking Increases Accurate Belief Updating and Hostile Media Perceptions

ABSTRACT

Concerns over misinformation have inspired research on how people are influenced by, and form perceptions of, media messages that aim to correct false claims. We juxtapose two seemingly incongruent expectations from the theories of motivated reasoning and hostile media perceptions, uncovering the unique effects of presenting a political news story with corrective information as a “fact-check.” We test our theoretical expectations through two online survey experiments. We find that compared to a conventional style of news reporting, a news story presented in a fact-checking genre significantly increases how accurately people are able to evaluate factual information, but it also comes with an important counterproductive effect: people will be more likely to perceive the journalist and the story as biased. We discuss the implications of our findings in theorizing the persuasion effects of corrective information in the contemporary media environment.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

¹ Both Study 1 and Study 2 were approved by the UW-Madison IRB. Project name: Evaluation of News Styles, 2017–1559.

² Trump’s original claim contains two parts: high crime rate and strictest gun laws. The stimuli in Study 1 covered both parts, giving merit to the crime rate part while debunking the gun law part, thus rating the whole claim as “half-true.” In the survey questions, however, we specifically asked participants to rate the truthfulness of the gun law claim (which should be rated as false). Our stimuli were based on how Trump’s claim was actually covered in real-world news and thus kept the integrity of the claim and some level of realism (e.g., Farley, 2017; Kurtzleben, 2017); however, because this may create ambiguity for participants, we made changes to simplify this design in Study 2.

³ Results do not differ in substantial ways from the findings reported here when we use the mean of HMP toward the story and HMP toward the journalist as the dependent variable (see Appendix 4).

⁴ Results do not differ in substantial ways from the findings reported here when we use the mean of HMP toward the story and HMP toward the journalist as the dependent variable (see Appendix 4). The Pearson’s correlation coefficient between the two items is 0.80.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; support for this research was provided by the University of Wisconsin ‐ Madison Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation [AAF3113].

Notes on contributors

Jianing Li

Jianing Li is a doctoral candidate and a Knight Scholar of Communication and Civic Renewal in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on the formation of misperceptions and the correction of misinformation in a contested communication environment.

Jordan M. Foley

Jordan M. Foley (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) is an assistant professor in the Journalism and Media Production department in the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University. His research focuses on how political information flows through digital communication ecologies over time and how that influences individual beliefs, professional journalistic practices, and democratic governance.

Omar Dumdum

Omar Dumdum (ABD, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is a doctoral candidate in Mass Communications, double-minor in Political Science and Global Studies, at UW-Madison.

Michael W. Wagner

Michael W. Wagner (Ph.D., Indiana University) is a professor and director of the Center for Communication and Civic Renewal in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is editor of the Forum section of Political Communication and the author of more than 50 books, articles, and edited book chapters in outlets such as Journal of Communication, Annual Review of Political Science, and Human Communication Research.