Source or Content? How News Consumers Evaluate Foreign Affairs Reporting

• In Event: Trust in News: Comparative Perspectives

Abstract

The choices people make about where they get their news could have potentially important consequences for their understanding of politics and current events. A complex set of beliefs and preferences may underlie the choices people make about which sources to consume, including preferences and beliefs related to the sources producing news and preferences and beliefs related to the substantive content of reporting. Previous research suggests that when judging the accuracy of information, people pay far more attention to content than to sourcing (Dias et. al. 2020). However, sourcing might matter more to news consumers when examining a broader range of outcomes than perceived accuracy. Beliefs about the biases, capacity, reputation, and expertise of news outlets might affect news consumers’ judgments about the importance, relevance, informativeness, and bias of reporting, even if they believe the facts in the reporting to be accurate. News outlets may also serve as a partisan cue, and consumers may be more interested in the reporting of news outlets they perceive as sharing their partisan beliefs. Consumer attention to sourcing may also vary depending on the subject of the reporting. Sourcing may be especially important to consumers when the content concerns political topics about which the consumer has relatively little information and weak prior beliefs.

In this study, we conduct an experiment to test the effect of source attribution on evaluations of news content. We focus specifically on content related to U.S. foreign policy and foreign affairs, topics about which people are likely to have relatively weak prior beliefs. Respondents are asked to evaluate a selection of real news and analysis content drawn from a variety of news outlets. They are randomly assigned to either a blind or non-blind condition. In the blind condition, the news content is presented without source attribution while in the non-blind condition, the true source of the content is revealed. After each excerpt, respondents are asked a series of questions pertaining to the value of the reporting. The set of outcome measures varies across respondents to capture the different criteria by which people may judge news content’s value including accuracy and reliability, interestingness, importance, and bias. To measure the strength of source-based news preferences, we compare responses in the blind condition to responses in the non-blind condition.

In addition to assessing the effect of source attribution on perceptions of news content, we also examine the responses in the blind condition to learn how people evaluate coverage of foreign affairs and U.S. foreign policy in the absence of source cues. We analyze the text of the excerpts used in the study to examine how respondent interest varies across topics and across frames. We also examine how evaluations of news content vary across respondent ideology and respondent partisanship. Taken together, the study provides insight into the content-based and source-based preferences that may contribute to selective exposure.

Authors

• Ashley Blum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Adam J. Berinsky