Increased Persuasion Knowledge of Video News Releases: Audience Beliefs About News and Support for Source Disclosure

Abstract

Video news releases (VNRs) have been criticized when they are used within a newscast without source disclosure because they violate ethical codes related to transparency and consumers' “right to be informed” by whom they are being persuaded. In an experiment, we show how increased persuasion knowledge about VNRs is positively related to beliefs in news commercialization, beliefs in VNR inappropriateness without disclosure, and support for disclosure of VNR material. We suggest that increased knowledge about VNRs without source disclosure measures might harm messages that are not employing the tactic (“false positives”) and lead to a general distrust of all media.

Notes

1. Our secondary data analysis used the national DDB consumer data collected among randomly chosen people through a mail survey in July 2005 (N= 1,080). We performed hierarchical multiple regression analysis to predict support for VNR labeling with three major predictors (beliefs in news commercialization, distrust in news, and support for VNR labeling) and six control variables (sex, race, age, income, education, and liberalism). The regression model indicated that the more people believe news is commercialized, the more likely they are to support VNR labeling (beta = .265, p < .001), even after all the other variables were controlled. The strong bivariate association between media distrust and support for government VNR regulation (r = .118, p < .001) became non-significant after all of the rest of variables were controlled in the regression model (beta = .036, p = n.s.), probably due to the strong role of media commercialization in predicting the dependent variable. Overall, the regression model explained about 12% of the total variance in the criterion variable. Almost two-thirds of this was explained by media distrust and news commercialization predictors. In addition, our mediation test, following Baron and Kenny's (1986) procedure, found media trust has a significant indirect effect on the dependent variable through beliefs in media commercialization (Z = 6.59, p < .001).