The Context of Content: The Impact of Source and Setting on the Credibility of News

Abstract

Twitter, blogs and alternative news sites play an increasingly important role in the realm of news and journalism. Journalists often use Twitter to survey the public opinion and to gather information for their articles. At the same time, there has been an explosive growth of non-journalistic websites that have started to compete with professional news organizations for the attention from the audience. What do these trends mean for the credibility of news that citizens consume? In a survey-embedded experiment (N=1,979) we address this question by investigating argument credibility within news articles, varying the sources that are cited, the type of news outlet and the style of information gathering by the journalist. Confirming our hypothesis, the results show that arguments are more credible when experts are cited instead of random citizens. However, it appears that the credibility of arguments is judged the same, regardless of the type of online outlet (either the website of an interest group or the website of an independent quality newspaper). Further, arguments based on information from Twitter and based on face-to-face interviews are judged differently under specific conditions. The apparent indifference of citizens towards the origin and interests of information sources has significant democratic implications.