ABSTRACT
Second-level agenda-setting suggests that news media influence how we think. As a case study examining the nature and effects of mainstream news media’s coverage of the 2015 Apple/FBI dispute about data privacy versus national security, this study found via content analysis that a majority of articles covering the dispute (73.7%) made the same potentially misleading claim about how the American public feels about the dispute. Nearly half (45.6%) of those articles made public opinion claims without offering empirical evidence, and almost all articles (97.4%) that cited the Pew survey appeared to have inadvertently created an unsubstantiated social reality. Then, this study found in a subsequent experiment that, consistent with impersonal influence, the above-mentioned news portrayals significantly affected the participants’ view on Americans’ collective opinion towards the Apple/FBI dispute. The long-term effect of this journalistic oversight is notable. Theoretical implications and practical recommendations for future science communication in the news are discussed.
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank Dean Anne Balsamo for funding this study through the faculty research grant, as well as M Tsai and anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on this study.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Over half (54.5%) of all news articles on the Apple/FBI dispute include at least one poll.
2 Among all 73.7% news article that made claims about public opinion, 27.4% did not include poll results of any kind.