Issue stance and perceived journalistic motives explain divergent audience perceptions of fake news

Abstract

Issue stances have always been an important factor in audiences’ news processing, and this study found that audiences’ attributions of motives to journalists can also affect news evaluations, particularly regarding whether a story is fake news. By exposing participants in Hong Kong to a news post (N = 215) via an online experiment, the findings suggest participants with opposing issue stances on the extradition bill controversy are likely to perceive the exact same new story as inaccurate and fake to significantly different degrees, consistent with the line of hostile media perceptions research. More notably, the phenomenon can be explained by the motives participants attribute to journalists. Among bill supporters, perceiving the journalists to be advocating mediates the relationship between perceived news inaccuracy and news fakeness; whereas perceiving journalists to be defending the authorities mediates the same relationship among bill opponents. Overall, the importance of motive attributions should not be ignored in journalism studies.

Motivated Fake News Perception: The Impact of News Sources and Policy Support on Audiences’ Assessment of News Fakeness

“…Given the fact that most scholars consider the intent to deceive as either financially or politically motivated (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017;Tandoc et al, 2018), this study explored such motive perceptions underlying the creation of news content. Individuals might perceive that the author or media outlet has political motives, such as supporting a political candidate, influencing votes for a particular purpose, or swaying public opinion on particular issues (Tsang, 2020). In fact, such logic is consistent with a concept in advertising research termed "inferences of manipulative intent" (Campbell, 1995, p. 228).…”

“…Perceived news fakeness. Following how perceptions of news fakeness was measured in prior research (Tsang, 2020), participants were asked to what extent they thought the news story was (a) invented, (b) fabricated, and (c) could be considered fake news. The three items were recorded using a 1 to 5 Likert-type scale with 1 being "completely disagree" and 5 being "completely agree" (M = 3.04, SD = 1.08, Cronbach's α = .97).…”

An experimental study of the effectiveness of fact checks: interplay of evidence type, veracity and news agreement

“…That is, people tend to accept attitude-congruent, reinforcing information at face value and tend to reject information that counters their personal stance, even when it presents concrete evidence. Consistent with findings on hostile media perception (Vallone et al ., 1985), in which audiences holding opposing points of view were found to evaluate the exact same news message as fake to significantly different degrees (Tsang, 2021, 2022b). In this sense, whether a fact check can discount a news message and correct beliefs largely depends on the readers' prior beliefs.…”

STEM: Unsupervised STructural EMbedding for Stance Detection

“…Understanding the stance of participants in a conversation is expected to play a crucial role in conversational discourse parsing, e.g., (Zakharov et al 2021). Stance detection is used in studying the propagation of fake news (Thorne et al 2017;Tsang 2020), unfounded rumors (Zubiaga et al 2016;Derczynski et al 2017), and unsubstantiated science related to, e.g., global warming (Luo, Card, and Jurafsky 2021) and the COVID-19 vaccine (Tyagi and Carley 2020).…”