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Abstract
Journalists are increasingly concerned that offensive and banal user comments on news websites might alienate readers and damage quality perceptions. To explore such presumed effects, we investigated the impact of civility and reasoning (and lack thereof) in user comments on perceptions of journalistic quality. An experiment revealed that unreasoned comments decrease an article’s perceived informational quality, but only in unknown news brands. Incivility in comments had an unconditionally negative effect on the perceived formal quality of an article. Neither civility nor reasoning improved the assessments of journalistic quality, as compared to a comment-free version. On the contrary, we observed a trend showing that the mere presence of comments deteriorates the perceived quality of an article.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. These questions were posed at the end of the questionnaire. However, reporting the full results of these questions is beyond the scope of this paper.
2. Pairwise comparisons showed that, on average, in known and unknown brands, an article’s informational quality was rated the same whether it was not accompanied by comments (mean = 0.13, SE = 0.08) or was accompanied by reasoned comments (mean = 0.05, SE = 0.05; p for the mean difference = 0.43), but was rated lower when it was accompanied by unreasoned comments (mean = −0.09, SE = 0.06; p values for the mean differences < 0.07).