No abstract

Populist politicians increasingly accuse opposing media of spreading disinformation or “fake news.” However, empirical research on the effects of these accusations is scarce. This survey experiment (N = 1,330) shows that disinformation accusations reduce audience members’ trust in the accused news outlet and perceived accuracy of the news message, while trust in the accusing politician is largely unaffected. However, only individuals with strong populist attitudes generalize disinformation accusations to the media as an institution and reduce their general media trust. The phrase “fake news” does not amplify any of these effects. These findings suggest that politicians can undermine the credibility of journalism without much repercussion—a mechanism that might also threaten other authoritative information sources in democracies such as scientists and health authorities.

There is increasing evidence that citizens consume the news because it arouses them. However, to explain the motivated processing of news messages, research usually focuses on negative discrete emotions or the valence dimension of affect. This means that the role of arousal is largely overlooked. In this experiment, conducted in 2019 in Austria, I exposed 191 citizens to a televised news item about immigration—varying the level of threat, while taking physiological measures of negative valence and arousal, followed by self-reported indicators of motivated reasoning. The results indicate that combining the valence and arousal dimensions of affect is the preferred way to understand citizens' reactions to political news. While negative affect predicted motivated reasoning, these effects were much more pronounced for those who experienced high arousal at the same time. Not only does this illuminate some of the black box behind motivated reasoning, the consequences for journalism are profound: the way that journalists cover the news might unwittingly drive citizens apart.

Western democracies are increasingly defined by identity politics, where politics appeals to both political and other social identities. Consequently, political information processing should depend not just on political identity, but also on other identities, such as gender, race, or sexuality. For any given issue, we argue that the extent to which reasoning is motivated by one’s political identity depends on citizens’ group status in other relevant identities, that is, that political identity more strongly motivates high-status group members than low-status group members for issues of identity politics. A survey experiment (N = 1012) concerning a gender quota policy shows that political identity motivates men more strongly than women, leading to political polarization between left-wing and right-wing men, but not women. This suggests that political motivated reasoning should be addressed differently in situations of identity politics, and urges the consideration of group status as a conditional factor of motivated reasoning.

Framing research has predominantly revealed detrimental effects of episodic news frames, including individualist blame attributions and political cynicism. However, such frames may also discourage group biases and impede motivated reasoning regarding identity politics. In two experiments ( N = 815; N = 1,019), we test the effect of episodic frames on group-consonant attitudes through identity-motivated reasoning. The two studies produce mixed results. Episodic frames might decrease gender-motivated reasoning for women with weaker gender identities when news threatens their identity, but not for men or for women with stronger gender identities. The implications for journalism and democracy are discussed.