Abstract
This study tests through an experiment the hypothesis that heavy emphasis on conflicts in the news undermines political trust and has an impact on citizens’ cynicism and political participation. Findings do not support a uniform negative impact of the conflicts covered in the news but demonstrate a cumulative effect of their levels of intrusiveness and incivility. In addition, we found consistent evidence that personal characteristics influence people’s reactions to conflicts. For extrovert individuals, who are typically more assertive in public matters, have higher levels of political knowledge and feel more politically efficacious, exposure to conflict frames does not necessarily result in lower political trust.
Highlights
This study tests through an experiment the hypothesis that heavy emphasis on conflicts in the news undermines political trust and has an impact on citizens’ cynicism and political participation
The level of political trust reported by the groups subjected to conflict news frames is smaller than the one reported by the control group which, in turn, is smaller than the political trust reported by the non-conflict frame group
This proves that people subjected to nonconflict news frames tend to report a higher level of political trust than those who are subjected to conflict frames
Summary
This study tests through an experiment the hypothesis that heavy emphasis on conflicts in the news undermines political trust and has an impact on citizens’ cynicism and political participation. The Complicated Relation Between News Frames and Political Trust conflicts and the way they have been framed by the Romanian media have been reported by various journalistic institutions and international NGOs.. We test through an experiment whether the exposure to such high levels of political conflict covered in the news necessarily leads to public mistrust and apathy towards political participation or if there are other variables, which can help us understand how the political controversies are linked to the public's representations of political leaders and institutions. We wanted to add a more fine-grained understanding of the impact of the political conflicts routinely covered by the media; we have tested two variables which have not been previously analysed in direct relation to the impact of journalistic coverage of politics on political trust: issue obtrusiveness and the valence of political conflicts over contentious issues (civil vs uncivil debates and controversies). The main goal of this study has been to provide a theoretical understanding of news frames revolving around political conflicts and to advance an experimental design that could potentially isolate their differential impacts on political trust
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