Interactions of News Frames and Incivility in the Political Blogosphere: Examining Perceptual Outcomes

Abstract

The anonymity and flexibility of the online world allows the free expression of views. This same anonymity and unconstrained expression can initiate uncivil debate. The political blogosphere is thus replete with uncivil discussions and becomes an apt context to examine the influence of incivility on news frames. Moreover, although there is an increasingly growing literature on framing, few have examined framing effects in the contemporary media landscape. Thus, the present study brings in literature from incivility and framing effects to examine the influence of incivility on news frames for perceptual outcomes. The study uses an experiment embedded in a Web survey. Findings show that incivility increases the credibility of a news article while decreasing political trust and political efficacy. Further, results demonstrate the interactions of incivility and news frames. For instance, news credibility is increased only in the value framed condition. And a combination of strategic frames and incivility results in the least political trust and external efficacy. Implications are discussed.

[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource(s): stimulus material for the experiment.]

Keywords:

• incivility
• political blogs
• news frames
• news credibility
• political trust
• efficacy

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Dhavan Shah, Zhongdang Pan, Douglas McLeod, and Albert Gunther for their useful comments during various stages of this project. The author would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers and Shanto Iyengar for helpful comments.

Notes

1. I would like to thank Shanto Iyengar for this suggestion.

2. The unit of analysis for this study is the article. The search words used were gay rights, gay marriage, and same-sex marriage. Each news story was coded for the presence of the two identified frames: strategy and value. Intercoder reliability was calculated using Cohen's kappa. The percentage of agreement between the two coders was established at an average of 91% on all measures.

3. Due to the controversies regarding the problems of partial η² values generated in the SPSS computer software, this study used η² for effect size, which is a more conservative measurement than the partial η² (Levine & Hullet, 2002).