Abstract
Do people with a more pessimistic worldview also select more like-minded news that confirms their negative—sometimes irrational—outlook on reality? This study theorizes that, based on the negativity and confirmation biases in audience digital news selection, a pessimistic outlook increases the likelihood of self-selection of more negative and episodic headlines over positive and thematic news. In a next step, news media literacy (NML) literature is consulted to explore how to counter this tendency to, via news selection, confirm an overly negative and distorted worldview. A selective-exposure experiment (N = 612) monitored participants’ self-selection of crime news after exposure to NML interventions. Findings show that those participants who hold a more pessimistic outlook on crime in society tend to confirm this worldview by self-selecting into more negative crime news. Exposure to NML interventions concerning negativity bias or clickbait was found to mitigate this negativity bias in news selection, especially for those who already hold a pessimistic outlook. This study is the first to document that NML interventions can potentially have merits as a tool to combat negativity bias in online news selection.
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