Media Credibility

Abstract

Audience perceptions regarding the credibility of news media have been studied using several concepts, including “media credibility,” “trust in media,” “media skepticism,” and “media cynicism.” In general, researchers interested in the credibility concept are concerned with audience perceptions of news media, not with the actual credibility of journalists. Early research on media credibility conducted at Yale in the 1950s manipulated the credibility of communicators and measured the impact of this manipulation on audience persuasion. Only in the 1970s did scholars begin to treat it not as a static trait of the source but as a dynamic perception of the audience. A major line of research on media credibility has to do with a phenomenon called “hostile media perception,” which takes place when involved people with opposing opinions on an issue perceive the very same, seemingly objective coverage as biased against their respective points of view. Other lines of research have examined the factors underlying audience credibility perceptions and their consequences for various social phenomena. Recently, scholars have revisited early work on medium credibility to investigate audience perceptions of online versus traditional media.