Bad Impressions: How Journalists as “Storytellers” Diminish Public Confidence in Media

ABSTRACT

A somewhat common journalistic branding effort is use of the cue “storyteller.” To better understand the impression the “storyteller” brand leaves, we fielded a survey-embedded experiment from a national sample of 2,133 US adults. The randomly assigned treatment credits a news article on a local political matter to a journalist using the “storyteller” brand. Drawing on media bias survey questions from the literature and sentiment analysis, we find consistent evidence that the “storyteller” cue lowers positive response to the journalist among respondents (although there remain various research avenues for additional insights on this topic).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Note that we do not explicitly test whether these professional descriptors function as cues or frames – or both – in affecting audience perceptions (see, Druckman et al., 2010 for a discussion).

² For additional information about MTurk respondent recruitment: https://www.mturk.com.

³ For information about Lucid Theorem, see https://luc.id/theorem/

⁴ Owing to the ordinal nature of the Likert responses, we also ran our analysis with an ordered logit estimator. There were no substantive differences in outcome between the logit and OLS results. Given the more straightforward interpretation from the linear estimation approach, we report the OLS results.

⁵ Question Item: “On the whole, do you consider this story biased in any way?”

⁶ Question Item: “Do you think the news site publishing this story sensationalized any aspects of the story?”

⁷ Question Item: “Do you think the news site publishing this story trivialized any aspects of the story?”

⁸ Question Item: “Do you think the story portrays everyone involved fairly?”

⁹ Acquiescence bias effects are unlikely to explain the effect similarities for the five outcomes since the Likert scale order was programmed to reverse at random across the respondent pool.

¹⁰ Question Item: “Do you think the reporter may have been biased in any way?”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brian Calfano

Dr. Brian Calfano (Ph.D., University of North Texas) is a professor of Political Science and Journalism at the University of Cincinnati. [email protected]..

Jeffrey Layne Blevins

Dr. Jeffrey Layne Blevins (Ph.D., Ohio University) is a professor of Journalism at the University of Cincinnati. [email protected].

Alexis Straka

Dr. Alexis Straka (Ph.D., University of Cincinnati) is a research analyst for NielsenIQ. [email protected].