Addressing fake news requires a multidisciplinary effort

The omnipresence of political misinformation in the today's media environment raises serious concerns about citizens' ability make fully informed decisions. In response to these concerns, the last few years have seen a renewed commitment to journalistic and institutional fact-checking. The assumption of these efforts is that successfully correcting misinformation will prevent it from affecting citizens' attitudes. However, through a series of experiments, I find that exposure to a piece of negative political information persists in shaping attitudes even after the information has been successfully discredited. A correction--even when it is fully believed--does not eliminate the effects of misinformation on attitudes. These lingering attitudinal effects, which I call "belief echoes," are created even when the misinformation is corrected immediately, arguably the gold standard of journalistic fact-checking.Belief echoes can be affective or cognitive. Affective belief echoes are created through a largely unconscious process in which a piece of negative information has a stronger impact on evaluations than does its correction. Cognitive belief echoes, on the other hand, are created through a conscious cognitive process during which a person recognizes that a particular negative claim about a candidate is false, but reasons that its presence increases the likelihood of other negative information being true. Experimental results suggest that while affective belief echoes are created across party lines, cognitive belief echoes are more likely when a piece of misinformation reinforces a person's pre-existing political views.The existence of belief echoes provide an enormous incentive for politicians to strategically spread false information with the goal of shaping public opinion on key issues. However, results from two more experiments show that politicians also suffer consequences for making false claims, an encouraging finding that has the potential to constrain the behavior of politicians presented with the opportunity to strategically create belief echoes. While the existence of belief echoes may also provide a disincentive for the media to engage in serious fact-checking, evidence also suggests that such efforts can also have positive consequences by increasing citizens' trust in media. Degree Type DissertationDegree Name

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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The history of sports culture and fandom has long been as reactionary as it has been hospitable to progressive politics. As the most conspicuous recent example, NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s U.S. anthem protest generated intense controversy with many critics claiming that sports and politics should, generally, not mix—a condemnation that ignores that context’s already pervasive militaristic nationalism. This article offers the first nationally representative examination of fans’ antipathy toward sports’ politicization through a critical textual analysis and inductive classification of their responses to the issue. Ostensibly “aracial” rebukes to that activism could nonetheless be characterized in lineage with historically stereotypical representations of and affronts to black athletes: as threatening to society, not intellectually equipped to engage, and illegitimate as leaders.

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The number of Americans who report engaging in interpersonal persuasion during elections has drastically increased over the past decade. While past studies have demonstrated the impact of such proselytizing on vote choice, the author finds substantial evidence that it may also have larger democratic benefits, both for those attempting to persuade and for those whom they choose to target. Data from the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey suggest that (a) attempting to persuade contributes to people’s ability to give reasons in support of both their own preferred candidate and the opposing candidate, and (b) persuasive conversation is a powerful channel for the spread of political information from the more engaged to the less engaged.