Comments posted to news sites do not always live up to the ideals of deliberative theorists. Drawing from theories about deliberation and group norms, this study investigates whether news organizations can affect comment section norms by engaging directly with commenters. We conducted a field study with a local television station in a top
Transparency is an oft-cited remedy for the public’s lack of confidence in the news media. Yet scant empirical evidence exists to support this claim. This article presents a test of the relationship between increased journalistic transparency and credibility evaluations of a news organization. Experimental results suggest that increasing transparency (by providing news consumers with information about why and how a story was written, details about the story’s author, etc.) leads to an increase in credibility evaluations and intentions to engage with news. These results hold across the three different article topics used in our experiment and regardless of the participants’ political ideology. Implications for news organizations and contributions to theory are discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.