Evidence of the value of professional journalism — and the complicated role of social media

The year 2024 has featured a series of pivotal and hotly contested elections around the world, and the U.S. presidential election — the campaign for which has gone through a whipsaw of a summer, to say the least — is still to come. The timing is right, then, to take stock of a key question that looms large: Why do so many people around the world express so little trust in elections, and what impact do news and social media have in ameliorating or exacerbating these problems?

Enter this special issue of the esteemed journal Public Opinion Quarterly. It opens with an essay by the issue editors arguing that while the number of countries with elections has grown, the level of trust that voters express in the electoral process has fallen to worrying levels in many parts of the world — not to mention there are growing number of citizens, even in well-established democracies, who refuse to recognize legitimate elections as free and fair (see the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol). “Political polarization, social divisions, and the rapid spread of misinformation have all been related to enhanced widespread skepticism about the quality of national elections,” the special issue editors write.

But a lot of questions remain about the precise role of media and tech platforms in this global crisis of trust in elections. This is particularly so because, let’s face it, the information landscape has become wildly complicated and cacophonous in the digital era: long gone are the days when people typically relied on a few traditional sources — such as the press, TV ads, and conversations with family and friends — to make sense of politics and elections.

Let’s consider three articles from the special issue that offer some useful clues about the crisis.

The first paper — “The electoral misinformation nexus: How news consumption, platform use, and trust in news influence belief in electoral misinformation,” by Camila Mont’Alverne, Amy Ross Arguedas, Sayan Banerjee, Benjamin Toff, Richard Fletcher, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen — explores beliefs in electoral misinformation by examining people’s online news consumption during the contentious 2022 Brazilian presidential campaign. Because relying on self-reported measures (e.g., surveys and interviews) can be less reliable than looking at behavior directly, the researchers gathered web and mobile tracking of 2,200 internet users in Brazil, resulting in a dataset of 42 million clicks in links and apps. They combined that with online surveys involving the same research participants, and did that before, during, and after the election. Their goal was to isolate the role and influence of the type of news consumed — and people’s attitudes about those sources of news — in connection with beliefs about electoral misinformation.

Their research findings underscore the value of traditional news media: All things equal, the more exposure that people had to news from “legacy news brands,” the less likely they were to believe in electoral misinformation. No effect, meanwhile, could be identified with people’s consumption of news from digital-born outlets (though perhaps this was because such organizations are not widely used at this point).

“Consistent with a growing number of studies,” Mont’Alverne and colleagues write, “our findings add to evidence indicating how professionally produced news from legacy media organizations may be helpful in countering misinformation during a contentious election cycle.” Notably, too, they argue that this finding cuts against the concern in some quarters that the news media may play a role in increasing people’s belief in misinformation. The evidence here suggests just the opposite.

The researchers also looked at the role of digital platforms generally, and found no obvious effects on belief in electoral misinformation. “This suggests that while there clearly are numerous examples of electoral misinformation spreading on digital platforms — and often lax or inconsistent content moderation and enforcement of community standards, including against prominent politicians — there is, in our data, no evidence of a more general link between digital platform use and belief in electoral misinformation.”

These findings are heartening about the power and importance of professionally vetted journalism — but also a reminder that trust in news, just like trust in elections, is at a precarious place in many parts of the world, particularly at a time when legacy journalism has to compete more so than ever for people’s time and attention.

The second paper to highlight from the special issue examines how trust in traditional and social media relates to misperceptions about electoral integrity. In this piece — “A matter of misunderstanding? Explaining (mis)perceptions of electoral integrity across 25 different nations,” by Rens Vliegenthart, Carolien Van Ham, Sanne Kruikemeier, and Kristof Jacobs — the researchers argue that misperceptions of election integrity are likely be to shaped by dynamics involving two key things: (1) the trust that people have in different media sources and (2) the specific context in which they consume media (especially the level of press freedom in their country).

If it’s true, for example, that professional journalism is connected to clarifying misperceptions about election integrity (see above), or that social media are more associated with amplifying misinformation about elections, what happens when people have varying levels of trust in these information sources? And how that does play out in free-press democracies vs. authoritarian regimes where media are highly restricted?

Vliegenthart and colleagues tested their hypotheses using survey data gathered in 2023 from 25 countries with differing levels of electoral integrity. They found, as expected, that trust in traditional news media reduced people’s misperceptions about election integrity while trust in social media increased their misperceptions. Importantly, though: “These effects depend on the level of media freedom: in countries with low press freedom, the traditional media effect was significantly smaller, and for social media, the effect is even reversed.”

So, rather than adopting a sweeping characterization of the impact of media types — traditional media good! social media bad! — it’s useful to recognize the complex relationship that exists between media trust, media freedom, and beliefs about electoral trustworthiness. In countries where the government might control the press, social media may play a counterbalancing role. At the same time, though, the researchers also found that “high levels of media freedom, while essential for democracy, also enable the spread of misinformation about elections,” leading to a higher share of “unduly negative citizens” — like the deeply disgruntled and cynical voters who are not hard to find in many established democracies today.

Finally, the third article looks at how changing patterns of news use within an increasingly fragmented and polarized media environment might shape views about elections. In this paper — “Slant, extremity, and diversity: How the shape of news use explains electoral judgments and confidence,” by Yiming Wang, Sang Jung Kim, Yuanliang Shan, Yibing Sun, Xiaoya Jiang, Heysung Lee, Porismita Borah, Michael Wagner, and Dhavan Shah — the researchers conducted a two-wave panel survey before and after the 2020 U.S. election and combined that self-reported data with measures of the partisan slant of the various news outlets people used. The goal was to explore how “partisan extremity” and the relative political diversity in one’s media diet might be connected to things like public confidence in the 2020 election and belief in claims about fraud.

“Our findings show that Republicans (relative to Democrats) not only consume information aligned with their political beliefs in terms of greater slant, less diversity, and more extremity,” Wang and colleagues write, “but that their news slant was significantly associated with post-election attitudes questioning election administration, elevating the politician advocating these claims, Donald Trump, and acceptance of voter fraud beliefs.” Further tests “affirmed the role of right-wing news use, especially the increasing use of extreme-right-wing news, in a corresponding decline in electoral confidence and rising approval for Trump.”

While not terribly surprising, these results reinforce what has been described as the asymmetric nature of polarization between Republicans and Democrats — even as we should note that the idea of a “left vs. right” unidimensional political spectrum has been challenged.

The researchers did find, though, that a more diverse news diet can moderate the level of one’s belief in misinformation — and that’s a good thing to remember in an election year.

Research roundup

“Pointing fingers in the disinformation era: How journalists and politicians perceive each other’s role in spreading disinformation and its impact on their relationship.” By Emma van der Goot, Karolin Soontjens, Kathleen Beckers, Willem Buyens, and Peter van Aelst, in Journalism Studies. Few moments encapsulate the dysfunction that the relationship between many politicians and journalists has reached in recent years than Donald Trump refusing to take a question from CNN’s Jim Acosta at a 2018 press conference, shouting, “You’re fake news!” at him. But the absurdity of Trump’s outburst might obscure the notion that it reflects a deeply held belief by many politicians around the world. Journalists, they believe, are actively agents of disinformation, working to subvert the truth by deliberately disseminating false or misleading news.

The reverse, of course, is also a belief held by many journalists, an idea that has motivated generations of journalistic skepticism. How widely held are those beliefs, exactly? That was the question that van der Goot and her colleagues set out to answer. They surveyed 452 local politicians and 148 political journalists in the Flanders region of Belgium to find out to whom they attributed the spread of disinformation.

Perhaps surprisingly, it turns out journalists and politicians largely agreed on the causes of disinformation. They both pinpointed social media and the radical right as the top sources of disinformation, followed by the radical left and alternative media, with politicians and traditional media bringing up the rear.

Beyond that, of course, politicians were much more likely than journalists to see traditional media as a disinformation source (33% to 8%). The hostility between right-wing politicians and journalists was especially pronounced: Right-wing politicians and especially members of the Flemish right-wing populist party Vlaams Belang were more likely to view journalists as disinformation sources, and journalists saw radical right-wing politicians as producing significantly more disinformation than left-wing politicians.

Yet even if journalists saw politicians as sources of disinformation, they were no less likely to interact with politicians. They were more likely to rate their interactions with politicians as negative, though overall, interactions with politicians were quite positive. After all, as the authors noted, political journalists rely on access to politicians for their coverage, and it appears they saw a relatively small portion of extreme politicians as responsible for disinformation’s spread.

“Journalism practices in Western and Muslim majority countries: Culture matters.” By Basyouni Ibrahim Hamada, Abdel-Salam G. Abdel-Salam, and Saba Bebawi, in The International Journal of Press/Politics. To what extent are the values and norms of journalism global? And to the extent that they’re not, what accounts for the differences? Those questions have driven decades of theory and comparative research, as scholars have explored the role of the world’s media systems in shaping journalistic culture, as well as the interplay of a complex hierarchy of influences ranging from the individual to the society-wide.

The answer, as usual, is “it depends.” On the one hand, the dominance of Western culture has produced a globalizing force that pushes a uniformity in journalistic forms and values around the world. On the other, local cultural distinctiveness continues to fuel resistance to that uniformity, as journalists draw from non-Western values to continue to shape their work.

Hamada and his colleagues posit that one dimension should be particularly considered as a factor accounting for differences in journalistic values and culture around the world: Islam. Across Muslim-majority countries, the authors propose that despite their diversity, Islam functions as a “comprehensive lifestyle offering guidance for political, economic, and social behavior including journalism practices.”

Using results from a massive international survey of journalists in 12 Western countries and 12 Muslim-majority countries, the researchers found that journalists in Muslim-majority countries are more likely to see themselves as playing collaborative and interventionist roles, while reporting lower levels of autonomy and higher levels of political influence.

These findings, the authors contend, represent a complex interplay of cultural values and the influence of the largely authoritarian governments in Muslim-majority countries, creating an environment in which the political cultural prerequisites for journalistic autonomy simply do not exist. The end result, they argue, is that journalism is less global than scholars have often thought, as “the Western model of journalism practices no longer exerts a strong presence beyond the Western sphere.”

“Moralization of rationality can stimulate sharing of hostile and false news on social media, but intellectual humility inhibits it.” By Antoine Marie and Michael Bang Petersen, in Political Communication. One of the difficulties in fighting the spread of misinformation, conspiracy theories, and generally hostile political material online is what we might call the “do your own research” problem. We may think that the way to convince people not to share or believe those things is to persuade them of the value of following evidence and using rational thought. But many of the people believe they are following evidence and using coldly rational logic, that that’s precisely what led them to the misinformation/conspiracy/hostility in the first place.

Marie and Petersen’s study is a strong piece of evidence for the persistence of this problem. Through three experiments with US adults, they tested the role of “moralizing rationality” — seeing rational, evidence-based thinking as a moral virtue — in people’s willingness to believe and share hostile partisan information online, whether true or false.

They found that people who held rational thinking in high moral regard were more likely, not less, to share hostile claims. But perhaps just as notable was what connected those two concepts — status seeking and moral grandstanding. In other words, people trying to gain status by derogating and asserting superiority over others “may be intuitively drawn to claim to moralize rationality, because doing this allows them to frame their hostility as being warranted by superior virtues of truth-seeking and rationality.”

So what’s the alternative? Marie and Petersen put forward intellectual humility — the willingness to acknowledge the unreliability of your intuitions and consider others’ judgment — as a key factor in keeping people from sharing hostile and false claims. They found that those who valued intellectual humility were less likely to share hostile and believe false information, perhaps in part because intellectual humility appeared to crowd out those status-seeking motivations.

More than valorizing rationality, then, Marie and Petersen argued that good thinking requires us to “restrain the pretentions of the ego: trusting one’s hunches less, trusting others more, and sometimes suspending critique.”

“Harassed for their job: Exploring factors that render journalists prone to harassment and intimidation.” By Ilmari Hiltunen, Aleksi Suuronen, and Reeta Pöyhtäri, in Journalism Studies. The increase in harassment and intimidation of journalists around the world has drawn quite a bit of scholarly attention over the past several years, with research addressing how that harassment affects journalists, how they respond, and what kind of support their organizations provide (or don’t).

One area of this research that’s coming into focus is the picture of which journalists are most likely to be harassed, and what factors might lead to that harassment. Many scholars (including us) have spotlighted gender, as well as being part of a racial and ethnic minority group, as making journalists particularly vulnerable to harassment.

But occupational characteristics are a significant factor as well, and Hiltunen and his colleagues found that, among Finnish journalists at least, they outweigh personal characteristics. They surveyed 505 Finnish journalists and found that, befitting Finland’s status as being among the world’s leaders in press freedom, harassment levels were relatively low — a quarter had never been harassed or intimidated, and another 50% of journalists reported low levels of harassment.

Journalists who wrote opinion pieces or did investigative journalism were far more likely to be harassed, as well as those who worked in public broadcasting and were active on social media. Age, gender, and race and ethnicity were far smaller factors, though the researchers found that younger journalists were more likely to be harassed, especially young women. Given this data, Hiltunen and his colleagues cautioned against generalizations about harassment of particular groups of journalists, but noted the “double burden” on young women, something other scholars have also found.

While the overall finding of relatively low levels of harassment is encouraging, the authors noted that 42% of all respondents said that harassment and intimidation of journalists increased the mental strain of their work, a number that includes many journalists who reported low or no harassment. That finding, they wrote, suggests that “the harmful repercussions on journalism may stem more from fear of victimization and negative ripple effects than from direct personal experiences of being targeted.”

“Politicizing the pandemic? Partisan framing of the early COVID-19 pandemic was infrequent, particularly in local newspapers.” By C. Daniel Myers, in Political Communication. It’s become a truism of political media criticism that political journalists — especially in the U.S. — treat important problems as a political game, a strategic contest between parties, rather than as issues that deeply affect ordinary people. Scholars have been observing for decades that political stories are often set in a strategic or game frame, or in the frame of partisan politics, even for stories that don’t appear to be fundamentally political.

We all saw this type of political framing in the coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, when a public health issue quickly and inexorably became one defined by partisan politics. But a new study by Myers, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota, found that in the U.S., the partisan and game framing of COVID-19 news coverage may not have been as widespread in the early days of the pandemic as we might remember.

Myers compared coverage in The New York Times and The Washington Post with a sample of 27 local newspapers of various sizes. He analyzed the framing of 1,580 news articles about COVID-19 between February and May 2020, encompassing the brief period of relative political unity on the subject as well as the beginnings of the stark split in partisan attitudes on the subject.

He found that only 11% of articles framed COVID-19 in terms of partisan conflict, and just 3% framed it as a partisan game. The numbers were particularly low in local papers — 4% partisan conflict framing, and less than 1% partisan game framing.

The lack of partisan framing could be attributed to the relative spirit of bipartisanship during some of the period Myers sampled. The significant difference in partisan framing between national and local newspapers was notable, though, especially considering that, as Myers noted, much of the initial political conflict over COVID-19 took place at the state and local level regarding stay-at-home orders.

Myers suggested that the proximity on which local newspapers thrive may have provided a sufficient news peg for COVID-19 stories, rather than political framing. And he concluded with a lament — that as local news is hollowed out, among many other benefits, we may be losing one of our last major sources of news that isn’t framed primarily through a partisan lens.