https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4998-8366
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ABSTRACT
One important function of journalism is to provide reliable information. While news accuracy is well-studied, there is little research about news users’ reactions to errors. Equally little is known about the influence of situational and individual factors. In this paper, we build on forgiveness research to investigate if trait forgiveness along with other situational and individual factors can explain news users’ reactions to errors. Results of two online-survey experiments suggest that trait forgiveness, news media literacy, error corrections and apologies, and the perceived frequency of errors have a positive effect on reactions. Media cynicism and perceived error severity have a negative effect. Our results support the need for transparency in journalism and show that the relationship between journalists and their audience, as well as user characteristics, are important when investigating reactions to journalistic products and processes.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The data is available at: https://osf.io/m3rky
2 For example, we looked at the errors news outlets (e.g., Die ZEIT or ZDF heute) documented and corrected on their websites. We further read summaries of how German newsrooms handle errors (e.g., https://uebermedien.de/dokumentation-fehlerkorrektur-regeln-in-deutschen-redaktionen/)
3 To fill our quotas, we asked participants to indicate their age group in years (e.g., 30–39) at the beginning of each survey. The means are based on an additional question at the end of the survey where participants were asked to indicate their exact age. However, many participants were unwilling to answer this question, resulting in 104 and 113 missing values in Study 1 and 2 respectively.