Newspaper Bloggers
When Newspaper Reporters Blog: The Credibility of News and Blogs That Do or Do Not Match Participants Socio/Political Leanings
Abstract
Hostile-media-effects research suggests news consumers identify in even the most even-handed news stories a preponderance of bias against their own position. The present experiment searched for hostile-media effects in people’s responses to news stories and blogs that were either consistent or inconsistent with their own socio/political orientation. Surprisingly, people evaluated news stories as more credible than even blogs they agreed with. These results are interpreted in terms of the influence of variables that may have large influences on the processing of news and blogs: social presence, expertise and coorientation.
Though blogs exploded on the Internet, they were only slowly adopted by professional journalists and the mainstream American press. These online journals, or “web logs” comprised of links and postings in reverse chronological order, largely developed a reputation over the last few years for taking aim at the mainstream media, often with biting political comment. Thanks to the Internet and special self-publishing software, citizen journalists from myriad streams of life could take on legacy news media for what many characterized as unacknowledged biases, shallowness and arrogance, among a host of other complaints. Some bloggers also began breaking significant news, perhaps most notably during the 2004 presidential election. When Dan Rather and CBS news rushed a flawed report on President Bush’s disputed National Guard record onto the airwaves, bloggers challenged the authenticity of a key memo on which the report was based, and CBS eventually backed down (Gillmor, 2006).
Today, as mainstream newsrooms continue to experience devastating losses in audience and advertisers, citizen blogs are flourishing, unbounded by the physical, financial and legal constraints of mainstream publishing and broadcasting. Blog search engine Technorati reports more than 70 million blogs worldwide (Sifry, 2007), with an average of one new blog launching every second and more than a million new posts uploaded each day (Gillmor, 2006). A Pew Internet & American Life Project survey in 2006 found 8 percent of Internet users, or about 12 million American adults, keep a blog, while 39 percent of Internet users, or roughly 57 million American adults, read blogs (Pew, 2006).
Now mainstream media are embracing this form of writing. According to one national survey, Web traffic to the blog pages of the top 10 online newspapers grew 210 percent from late 2005 to late 2006 (Nielsen/NetRatings, 2006). CyberJournalist.net keeps a comprehensive list of blogs by and about journalists, and these blogs cover an array of topics and number in the hundreds (Dube, 2008). The most successful ones by professional journalists share some of the same characteristics as blogs by non-journalists, including distinctive author voice (Gillmor, 2006). At the heart of this endeavor are questions fundamental to more than a century of mainstream journalism and its core values: What happens to people’s perceptions of professional journalists’ credibility and authority when those journalists pull down the veil of objectivity and blog with voice and attitude? The reluctance of the mainstream press to adopt blogs because of such a threat may be justified. Or has the Internet simply re-defined notions of credibility?
This study seeks to explore these and other impacts in an experiment that examines the influence of blogs and traditional news stories by online newspaper journalists, as well as the credibility of each. Though many blogs are highly political, this study explores “liberal” and “conservative” ideas more from a social than a partisan standpoint. Our experiment seeks to advance theory by testing two types of news messages –– traditional news stories and blogs –– the latter of socially liberal or conservative bent; by introducing psychological variables as mediators; and by assessing credibility of the stories and the Web sites that carry them as dependent variables. To test the perceived influence of blogs and stories, our research borrows heavily from the rich tradition of hostile-media effects research and Reeves and Nass’ theory of media reality.
Literature review
Hostile-media effect
A cursory look at research on hostile-media effects (HME) suggests no current research has been done on blogs, which makes blogging an area ripe for theorizing. The hostile-media effect describes the tendency of people who are highly involved in an issue to see news coverage of that issue as biased, particularly against their own viewpoint. An oft-cited example are letters to the editor from partisan readers. Each side argues the news is slanted toward their opponents. In the first published experiment demonstrating the effect, Vallone, Ross and Lepper (1985) showed news broadcasts of the conflict in the Middle East to Arab and Israeli students and found that both groups saw the news as biased in favor of the other side, while nonpartisans saw the same content as neutral. Subsequent research explored this same divisive issue, often showing strong support for the effect (Giner-Sorolla & Chaiken, 1994; Perloff, 1989), while others took on similarly divisive issues. Christin, Kannaovakun & Gunther (2002), for instance, demonstrated hostile-media effects with highly partisan participants – UPS managers and Teamsters – during the 1997 United Parcel Service strike.
Since the Vallone, Ross & Lepper study (1985), scholars have published findings from at least a dozen experiments. Key in many of these studies is a person’s strong sense of group identification and membership, either social or political in nature, though some studies argue such identification may not be necessary (Gunther, Christin, Liebhart & Chia, 2001). Gunther and Schmitt (2004) suggest research on this perceptual variable has been growing in part, perhaps, because it shows the critical role of audience variables in mass communication processes, offering alternatives to traditional notions that the media have powerful, homogenizing effects on everyone. The authors also noted similar logic behind the third-person effect (TPE), which posits people will perceive more influence of an undesirable communication on others than on themselves (Davison, 1983), with that perceived influence increasing as the audience expands or becomes more distant from the self (Cohen, Mutz, Price & Gunther, 1989). In the case of hostile-media effects, Gunther and Schmitt’s (2004) experimental study on the genetically-modified-food debate revealed that if partisans consider messages only in terms of their own opinions, they will see the messages as neutral or favorable, while viewing the same messages as biased in a hostile direction when considering influence on others (Gunther & Schmitt, 2004).
One of the most important findings of their study is the effect seems to kick in only when the message is distributed via a mass medium, as opposed to a message in a student essay read by few. In other words, the distribution source triggers a different perceptual process in partisan readers. The authors argue more research needs to flesh out this effect in a variety of communication forms.
Psychological concepts
When people process news, they look for a human being behind it (Newhagen & Nass, 1988). Guiding much of our experiment is Reeves and Nass’ (1996) media-equation theory, which argues people’s interactions with computers, television and other media are fundamentally social, much like interactions in real life. Their evidence includes at least 35 studies that recreated a range of social and natural experiences but with media taking the place of real people and places (Reeves & Nass, 1996). Key to their conception of the media equation is that not only is the technology of the medium important but also the psychology of those who use it. Media-equation research falls squarely in line with decades of research into the dynamics of interpersonal communication, from dyads to large-group interactions. As such, this experiment examines the concepts of coorientation and social presence in relation to people’s perceptions of traditional news stories and blogs.
Coorientation
Most research on coorientation, or how people identify with each other based on shared ideas, has been conducted since the mid-1960s and is an eclectic synthesis of five older schools of thought dating back to 1902 (McLeod & Chaffee, 1973). Contemporary research has looked at everything from teenagers’ coorientation behavior toward pop music (Clarke, 1973) to the ways scientists view newspaper reporters based on personal contacts with them (Ryan, 1982).
In a special edition of American Behavioral Scientist devoted to explicating coorientation, Wackman (1973) identified three coorientation dependent variables useful in interpersonal research: 1) Agreement, or the similarity between two people’s cognitions about an object; 2) Congruence, or the similarity between one person’s cognition about an object and estimate of another person’s cognition about that object; 3) Accuracy, or the similarity between one person’s estimate of another’s cognitions about an object and that other person’s actual cognitions about the object.
Because the journalists in this experiment are not real, and therefore agreement and accuracy cannot be measured, this study measures congruence to capture participants’ awareness and perceptions of the writers of the stories and the writers’ ideas about various topics. This study seeks to expand on recent findings that suggest perceived story credibility could in part be a product of coorientation (Meyer, Marchionni & Thorson, 2007).
Social presence
Short, Williams and Christie (1976) introduced social presence 30 years ago, drawing on scholarship that seeks to explain the social phenomena of mediated environments. They defined presence as “the degree of salience of the other person in the interaction and the consequent salience of the interpersonal relationship” (67). Because of the range of research, the concept has no true disciplinary home and numerous definitions (Hamman, 2006). Indeed, researchers have explored everything from social responses to computers (Reeves & Nass, 1996; Lee, 2006) to presence in virtual reality (Biocca, 1997).
Underlying much of this research is Reeves and Nass’ (1996) idea that people treat media as though they were human. They argue this happens because human brains evolved in a world in which all perceived objects were real and only humans possessed human-like shapes and human-like characteristics, such as language, emotion and personality. Anything that seemed real or possessed human characteristics was a real human (Reeve & Nass, 1996). Nass and his colleagues’ research around “Computers Are Social Actors” (CASA) found people automatically apply social rules in their interactions with computers as if the machines were human (Reeves & Nass, 1996). More recent research along these lines has explored normative group influences in computer-mediated communication (Lee & Nass, 2002); computers that convey empathic emotions (Brave & Nass, 2005); and the creation of social presence through machine-generated voices (Lee and Nass, 2005).
This experiment focuses on social-presence research concerning interpersonal communication in an online environment. Personal-communication researchers identify three dimensions of social presence: (1) source attention, defined as the degree to which the source is focused on relative to other cues, (2) co-presence, or the feeling of existing with another person, and (3) mutual awareness or psychological involvement –– the feeling of being “known” by another (Biocca et al., 2001; Gunawardena & Zittle, 1997; Tamborini & Skalski, 2005). This stream of interpersonal communication research defines social presence as the degree of psychological involvement or salience of real people communicating through a mediated environment. This definition is similar to Short, Williams and Christie’s (1976) by characterizing social presence as a feature of a medium, not the user. They argued that the social presence of a medium varied according to the number of social cues it offered.
Many current researchers, however, define social presence not as a characteristic of the medium but rather how participants use the medium to communicate (Gunawardena, 1995; Swan, 2002). Consistent with this approach, the present experiment draws on features of both the medium and user, defining social presence as a measure of a psychological feeling of distance that can vary depending on the characteristics of the medium and the message. We focused on how journalists can alter the characteristics of a news article in order to increase perceptions of social presence.
In light of the preceding discussion on how readers respond to media messages depending on their own political views and on the importance of key psychological variables in their responses, we offer the following hypotheses in each condition:
Traditional news stories
H1: The hostile media effect suggests that both liberals and conservatives will be slightly negative to news stories because, in spite of their “balance,” each side will see its tenets denigrated.
Blogs
H2a: Liberals will respond positively to blogs that are supportive of their own position. Their response to liberal blogs is likely to be more positive than to news stories.
H2b: Conservatives will respond positively to blogs that are supportive of their own position. Their response to conservative blogs is likely to be more positive than to news stories.
Credibility
Because of the news media’s longstanding reliance on the ideal of objectivity and its role in credibility, increasing social variables in stories potentially could harm people’s trust of the media. Definitions of media-related credibility abound in the literature. Generally, credibility is defined as a multidimensional construct that measures the perceived believability of a message (article), source (journalist or media company) or medium (newspaper, Web site, radio station, etc.). Partly in response to findings that people rated TV news as more credible than newspapers, despite the lack of depth and completeness, Gaziano and McGrath (1986) created a 12-item scale that included questions measuring fairness and community concern and that loaded onto a single factor, credibility. However, Meyer (1988) found their results indicated two factors, believability and community concern, and created a scale reflecting both. Many current credibility measures draw on both scales, including this experiment. Thus, this study defines credibility as material produced that the audience views as 1.) factual and accurate (believability dimension) and 2.) concerned mainly with the community’s interest (community-affiliation dimension) (Meyer, 1988). Further, the experiment assesses credibility at the level of the article, source (Web site) and owners of the source (organization).
Expertise
Closely related to credibility is the concept of expertise. Source credibility attracted the attention of social psychologists as a result of the work of Carl Hovland and his colleagues at Yale University in the 1950s. Hovland, Janis and Kelley (1953) proposed an approach to attitude and change that includes four determinants: source, message, recipient and channel. Hovland et al. (1953) suggested a two-dimensional measure of source credibility, “trustworthiness” and “expertise,” arguing a receiver’s tendency to accept a speaker’s message would depend on the receiver’s perception of how informed and intelligent the speaker is and how motivated the speaker is to make valid assertions. Among the indicators of expertise is similarity to receiver in status, values, interests and needs, or, taken together, social background.