Are Experts (News)Worthy? Balance, Conflict, and Media Coverage of Experts

• In Event: Policy Narratives and Discourse

Abstract

Democratic governance requires policymaker responsiveness to the public will. Substantial research has shown that government policy is indeed responsive to the broad contours public opinion on a host of issues (Page, Shapiro, and Dempsey 1987; Soroka and Wlezein 2009). The quality of the public’s signal to policymakers should therefore be of substantial interest. Ideally, such aggregate opinion will not diverge markedly from consensus expert opinion where it exists. Unfortunately, there is a large gulf that separates expert and public opinion on a wide range of science and economic questions directly relevant to public policy. Pew surveys of the public and members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science shows gaps that range from 18 percent to 50 percent on matters such as global warming, and the safety of GMOs. The same is true on questions of economics. Scholars have found an average difference of 35 percentage points between surveys of economists and the public across 18 issues (Sapienza and Zingales 2013). The largest differences existed on the issues where economists exhibited the largest agreement. The question is: why?
Multiple theories have possible relevance in explaining these discrepancies. First, individual-oriented research has shown that people ultimately reject advice from experts when it contradicts their prior beliefs or values (Kahan et al. 2012; Johnston and Ballard 2016). This perspective builds off a rich literature on motivated reasoning in cognitive psychology (Ditto and Lopez 1992; Kunda 1990; Lodge and Taber 2014). There is little doubt this is part of the story, but this perspective doesn’t go very far in explaining why the public diverges from experts on low salience matters that lack clear partisan or ideological implications. Second, media centered approaches emphasize that news outlets are often biased against providing context (Bennett 1998), which may limit coverage of consensus expert information. They may also be biased towards balance and conflict, which may undermine the persuasiveness of expert information by casting doubt on the expert position or exposing news consumers to other information sources they trust due to their partisan or ideological commitments (Bennett 1988, 1990; Boykoff and Boykoff 2007; Dunwoody 1999; Merkley and Stecula 2016; Trumbo 1995, 1996). Little work has systematically examined the media environment to show how often experts provide consensus information and whether this information is provided in a way that is easily processed by news consumers.
This paper presents an analysis of over 280,000 newspaper, newswire, broadcast, and cable American news stories on 10 issues where there are important elements of agreement among scientists or economists, including, but not limited to, climate change, immigration, free trade, nuclear power, genetically modified organisms, childhood vaccinations, and road pricing. It combines automated methods, such as machine learning and dictionaries, with manual coding. The analyses show that cues signaling expert agreement are vanishingly rare, even in relevant news content, though they are modestly more common in climate change coverage. Journalists, on average, orient their stories in support of the expert perspective, and only infrequently present a true balance of perspectives in news content. This is particularly true for climate change and vaccine coverage. False balance is typically uncommon, aside from in coverage of nuclear power and GMOs. More prevalent is the presentation of expert agreement amidst claims and counter claims by polarizing political actors that could prime motivated citizens to resist expert messages. The results have important implications for how we understand divergence between expert and public opinion and how we design experimental interventions related to information processing and expert information. Scholars need to take the information environment seriously going forward.

Author

• Eric Merkley, University of British Columbia