Explaining Mainstream News Media Use in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Roles of Partisanship, Perceptions of Threat, Negative Emotions, and News Media Trust

ABSTRACT

As the COVID-19 pandemic struck the United States amid the 2020 presidential election campaign, the public health crisis rapidly developed into a polarizing political issue. Within the context of a politicized public health crisis, efforts to deepen a scholarly understanding of how people’s information-seeking behaviors can be understood in relation to partisanship bear timely importance. In this light, this research aims to explore the relationship between partisanship and mainstream news media use in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study examines the role of perceived threat, negative emotions, and news media trust for helping to explain mainstream news media use. Analyses of data from a survey, conducted during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic (N = 546), confirm that perceptions of threat, along with negative emotions stemming from perceived threat, play a mediating role between partisan identification and mainstream news media use. Moreover, this research also demonstrates that the mediated relationship between these factors varies, depending on people’s perceptions of the news media’s trustworthiness. The findings of the study contribute to deepening scholarly understanding of media consumption behaviors during times of a politicized public health crisis.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Data. The data are openly accessible at http://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/ZW4XR.

Notes

¹ Despite such a definition of mainstream news media, and in contrast to how this study ultimately operationalizes mainstream media, results of a Pew Research poll indicate that U.S. citizens at large consider Fox News to be part of mainstream news media regardless of their partisan identities (Pew Research Center, 2021)

² Here, we note that we also ran analyses with this study’s data by using political ideology as the focal independent variable. Results largely remained consistent across the two measures: i.e., partisan identification vs. political ideology. Some exceptions are further addressed in the discussion section.

³ Of the 546 respondents who completed the survey, some did not provide answers to all the questions. Such missing values were excluded from the analyses.

⁴ For analytical purposes, the original scale used for the survey, ranging from 1 = extremely liberal to 7 = extremely conservative, was reverse-coded.

⁵ In this study, mainstream news media refers to news media that does not include social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. We recognize that social media outlets could be in the mix of one’s mainstream news media use. Still, we did not include social media in the composite dependent variable, as some people may not associate all the content found on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms with news media in general. In addition, despite the blurred distinction between mainstream and niche news media (i.e., news media leaning toward a specific political view, Shah et al., 2017), we excluded a media outlet usually deemed conservative (i.e., FOX News), as well as a media outlet that targets relatively niche, business-oriented audiences (i.e., The Wall Street Journal). Of note, we found that when including explicit measures of social media, FOX News, and The Wall Street Journal in the mainstream news media use measure (i.e., the dependent variable) of this study, the substance of our study findings does not change.

⁶ Of note, although the relationship between partisanship and negative emotions was not statistically significant, liberal ideology does positively predict negative emotions as shown in Table 4.

Additional information

Funding

The project was supported by Indiana University’s Arts and Humanities Council and the New Frontiers in the Arts & Humanities Program.

Notes on contributors

Junghyun Moon

Junghyun Moon (M.A., Sungkyunkwan University) is a doctoral student in the Media School at Indiana University Bloomington. His research focuses on exploring facets of public perceptions of media, especially as related to individuals’ perceptions of the effects and trustworthiness of the media.

Jason T. Peifer

Jason T. Peifer (Ph.D., The Ohio State University) is an associate professor of journalism in the Media School at Indiana University Bloomington. His research explores facets of citizens’ uncertainty about and trust in public institutions—especially as related to journalism practices, non-traditional news sources, and perceptions of media importance.