Who Trusts State Media? Source Cues, Bias, and Credibility in Non-Democracies

• In Event: Media & Autocracy

Abstract

Misinformation and propaganda are currently on the rise, especially in authoritarian countries, where governments employ sophisticated manipulation efforts and run constant propaganda campaigns through state-run media. However, we know very little about how citizens actually perceive state media organizations and whether they acknowledge their bias. Some studies posit that people in non-democracies should be skeptical about pro-regime media: due to extensive exposure to propaganda and censorship, citizens should recognize the inconsistency between media coverage and the reality on the ground, discounting state media messages as a result.

On the other hand, cross-national analyses show that (self-reported) trust in media is on average higher in non-democratic countries. In a recent survey in Russia, the majority of citizens found television, which is largely under the government's control, more trustworthy than other information sources. In some other non-democracies, citizens reported substantial trust in state media or found such outlets more trustworthy than private media organizations. These fundings suggest that strong bias and censorship are not necessarily obstacles to trust. However, such studies are few and have a number of limitations.

In this paper, I aim to distinguish between these two perspectives, focusing on trust in state-run and independent news organizations in Russia. There has been substantial scholarly attention to manipulation strategies of the Russian government, but it is much less clear whether these manipulations allow the government to maintain trust in state media or whether they backfire and undermine such trust.

I generate a set of theoretical predictions, building on the political persuasion literature. First, citizens can be guided by accuracy goals when they judge state-run and independent media, meaning that the degree of trust in particular news outlets is based on their observed bias. Trust in this case could be affected by individual level of sophistication that determines whether citizens are capable of detecting and understanding the degree of media bias. Second, in their assessment of media credibility, citizens can be guided instead by partisan goals and preferences---in this case, by their attitudes toward the regime. Sophistication, in turn, can either amplify or moderate partisan bias.

To empirically test these predictions, I have designed two experiments, in which I asked respondents to assess the truthfulness of news stories while randomly assigning different news outlets as sources of these messages. The first study was a survey experiment embedded in a nationally representative omnibus survey in Russia, and the second was an innovative online experiment that presented a range of news stories in the form of a popular quiz, fielded on a large sample (more than 36,000) of Russian social media users.

The results of two experimental studies suggest there is partisan bias in the evaluations of state-run and independent news media. In particular, regime supporters are more likely to trust state media outlets over independent news organizations, while regime critics, especially strong, liberal-minded regime opponents, are more likely to trust independent media over state media. More sophisticated citizens---those who are more educated or better informed---are not per se more skeptical about state-run media. Moreover, in a number of cases, sophisticated partisans are farther apart: gaps in perceptions of state and independent media are larger between more and less sophisticated regime supporters and between more and less sophisticated regime critics.

My findings have important implications for studies of persuasion and media manipulation. The studies show that partisan bias is at work in authoritarian countries and that it extends to perceptions of media outlets, preventing regime supporters from recognizing or acknowledging blatant disinformation and censorship. At the same time, even many regime opponents do not find state media less trustworthy than independent news organizations. This helps understand why many autocrats allow some independent media: if most citizens do not see independent news outlets as more credible, there is little harm for governments in keeping such media organizations around.

My analysis is also relevant for the growing formal theoretical work on censorship and media bias, especially in non-democracies. One of the common assumptions in this work is that the level of media bias is observed in equilibrium, but my results suggest that citizens in non-democratic regimes often do not fully recognize the bias of mainstream news organizations. The paper also enhances our understanding of partisan and hyperpartisan media.

Author

• Anton Shirikov, University of Wisconsin-Madison