New Perspectives on Media Credibility Research

Abstract

The mass media serves as an important forum in which journalists, public relations professionals, advertising practitioners, politicians, and issue advocates (as well as many others) try to educate, inform, pursue, and influence media audiences. The suc-cess or failure of such efforts can often depend on audiences’ overall perceptions of media credibility (Wanta & Hu, 1994).Scholarship has identified the concept of media credibility as a complex and mul-tidimensional construct (Berlo, Lemert, & Mertz, 1970). Research has typically focused on two main dimensions of media credibility: source credibility (Hovland, Janis, & Kelley, 1953; Sundar, 1998; Greer, 2003) and medium credibility (Gaziano, 1987; Kiousis, 2001; Newhagen & Nass, 1989). Source credibility research typically focuses on the characteristics of the message source (such as the speaker, the organiza-tion, or the news organization), whereas research on medium credibility focuses on the medium through which the message is delivered (for example, newspaper compared to television).Scholars of media credibility have pointed to the important influence of audience-based variables in their assessments of both source and medium credibility. These include, but are not limited to, variables such as age (Bucy, 2003), income (Ibelema & Powell, 2001), education (Mulder, 1981), gender (Robinson & Kohut, 1988), and race (Beaudoin & Thorson, 2005).The current issue of