Don’t Quote me: Effects of Named, Quoted, and Partisan News Sources

ABSTRACT

Many news organizations have developed policies on the use of named and unnamed sources, including whether the latter can be directly quoted or paraphrased in news stories. In this experiment, we test how audience members respond to these policy dictates by measuring news credibility in a political story that manipulated whether the source was named, whether that source was directly quoted, and the source’s political connection to the story. We found that while each of these manipulations had little or no main effects, they combined to trigger a discernible change in credibility in the eyes of the audience.

KEYWORDS:

• Political journalism
• experiment
• direct quote
• unnamed sources
• partisan media opinion hypothesis
• journalism ethics

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author MAD upon reasonable request.

ORCID

Megan Duncan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0547-2387

Kathleen Bartzen Culver http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1651-3452

Douglas McLeod http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5808-2457

Christopher Kremmer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1729-4354

Notes

1 To be clear to the participant, this question was phrased: Were the words of the researcher a direct quote? In other words, were the researcher's words between quotation marks like these: “Hello”?.