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

Partisan incivility is prevalent in news comments, but we have limited insight into how journalists and news users engage with it. Gatekeeping, cognitive bias, and social identity theories suggest that journalists may tolerate incivility while users actively promote partisan incivility. Using 9.6 million comments from The New York Times, we analyze whether the presence of uncivil and partisan terms affects how journalists and news users engage with comments. Results show that partisanship and incivility increase recommendations and the likelihood of receiving an abuse flag. Swearing increases the likelihood of a comment being rejected and reduces the chances of being highlighted as a NYT Pick. These findings suggest that journalists and news users interact with partisan incivility differently, and that some forms of incivility may be promoted or tacitly accepted in comments.

While fact-checking has grown dramatically in the last decade, little is known about the effectiveness of different formats in correcting false beliefs or overcoming partisan resistance to new information. This paper addresses that gap by employing theories from communication and psychology to compare two prevailing approaches: An online experiment examined how the use of visual "truth scales" interacts with partisanship to shape the effectiveness of corrections. We find that truth scales make fact-checks more effective in some conditions. Contrary to theoretical predictions and the fears of some journalists, their use does not increase partisan backlash against the correction or the organization that produced it. Keywords:Fact-checking; journalism; political communication; media effects 3 Correcting Political and Consumer Misperceptions: The Effectiveness and Effects of Rating Scale versus Contextual Correction FormatsWhile misinformation -about policies, politics, and even consumer goods -has always been a part of the media landscape, the last decade has seen the emergence of dedicated factchecking organizations aimed at correcting these inaccuracies (Amazeen, 2012;Graves, 2016;Kessler, 2014). These fact-checking organizations vary in organizational structure, research methods, and story presentation; one of the biggest divides concerns the use of ratings systems to that person processes it, and ultimately how successful it is in correcting misinformation. This paper presents the results of an experimental study designed to assess how including a rating scale shapes the effectiveness of a correction and whether this effect varies depending on the type of misinformation (political vs. non-political) and the party affiliation of the reader. We also examine how the inclusion of a rating scale affects readers' attitudes toward public figures and the media. Overall, we find strong evidence that truth scales can be effective tools in countering misinformation and offer few drawbacks. In a non-political context, the addition of a truth scale increases the effectiveness of a correction. In a political context, while the truth scale does not 4 significantly increase the correction's effectiveness, it also does not have the "backfire effect" that theories of motivated reasoning might predict. Even when a correction runs counter to a person's partisanship, the inclusion of a truth scale does not increase the likelihood that the reader will reject the correction or negatively evaluate the outlet that published it.

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This study examined the association between political ideology and linguistic indicators of integrative complexity and opinion leadership in U.S. political blog posts (N = 519). Using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text analysis, we found that the posts of conservative bloggers were more integratively simple than those of liberal bloggers. Furthermore, in support of a proposed opinion leadership model of integrative complexity, the relationship between ideology and integrative complexity was mediated by psychological distancing (an indicator of a hierarchical communication style). These findings demonstrate an ideological divide in the extent to which the blogosphere reflects deliberative democratic ideals.