How did Americans Really Think About the Apple/FBI Dispute? A Mixed-method Study

ABSTRACT

Second-level agenda-setting suggests that news media influence how we think. As a case study examining the nature and effects of mainstream news media’s coverage of the 2015 Apple/FBI dispute about data privacy versus national security, this study found via content analysis that a majority of articles covering the dispute (73.7%) made the same potentially misleading claim about how the American public feels about the dispute. Nearly half (45.6%) of those articles made public opinion claims without offering empirical evidence, and almost all articles (97.4%) that cited the Pew survey appeared to have inadvertently created an unsubstantiated social reality. Then, this study found in a subsequent experiment that, consistent with impersonal influence, the above-mentioned news portrayals significantly affected the participants’ view on Americans’ collective opinion towards the Apple/FBI dispute. The long-term effect of this journalistic oversight is notable. Theoretical implications and practical recommendations for future science communication in the news are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Science communication
• news coverage
• polls
• Pew survey
• content analysis
• experiment
• public opinion
• Apple
• FBI

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Dean Anne Balsamo for funding this study through the faculty research grant, as well as M Tsai and anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on this study.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Over half (54.5%) of all news articles on the Apple/FBI dispute include at least one poll.

2 Among all 73.7% news article that made claims about public opinion, 27.4% did not include poll results of any kind.