Unofficial Media, Government Trust, and System Confidence Evidence From China: An Empirical Exploration of the Attitudes of Netizens Based on the Dual Moderating Effect.

Caijuan Chen,Jie Ye,Li Li

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.763658

Abstract

Mass media has a significant impact on public support for the government. This manuscript constructs a mixed model with official media use as the moderating variable and government trust as the intermediary variable to explore the mechanism of how unofficial media use affects system confidence, using data from a survey of the political and social attitudes of netizens (2015). The study finds that official media use weakens the negative role of unofficial media use in building system confidence, with the intermediary variable of government trust creating the necessary conditions for weakening the effect of unofficial media use. Moreover, the effect of unofficial media use on system confidence is heterogeneous. These findings remind us that it is necessary to deepen research into the micromechanisms that explain how unofficial media use reduces system confidence, a task for which cognitive theory is well suited.

Highlights

Political and mass media scholars believe that “the public” is a constructed concept (Srinivasan and Diepeveen, 2018)
Against the background of CPC’s propaganda system, the relationship between the news media and the public’s political trust is likely to differ from that in western countries. This manuscript introduces political trust and unofficial media use as intermediary and moderating variables, respectively, to deepen the study of political media communication and the effect of unofficial media use. This manuscript makes the following contributions to existing research: (1) we focus on the indirect effects of the independent variable and the interaction effect with other variables by concentrating on the direct and net effects of the independent variables affecting political trust; (2) by taking official and unofficial media use into the analytical model “simultaneously” but not “side by side,” and by analyzing the mediated moderator, we expand the research work in the field of political communication; (3) based on exciting extant research (Easton, 1965; Muller et al, 1982) and actual research data, we divide the political trust into system confidence and government trust, with the help of moderating effect analysis, and further comprehensively examine the contingency mechanism and preconditions to changes in system confidence
Official Media Use as a Mediated Moderator Based on Hypothesis 2, we further examine whether, in the process of unofficial media use impacting system confidence, the positive moderating effect of official media use is based on government trust

Summary

Introduction

Political and mass media scholars believe that “the public” is a constructed concept (Srinivasan and Diepeveen, 2018) These authors point out that the media shapes the public’s perception of political philosophy, such as “what justice is” (Baranauskas and Drakulich, 2018), and influences the public’s understanding of public policy issues in various ways (Woodruff, 2019); these influences exist in the processes of agenda-setting, policy development, evaluation, and termination (Fawzi, 2018). Due to these influences, the media is seen as playing a central role in democratic politics (Arceneaux et al, 2016). Political discourse has become increasingly “mediumized” (Kissas, 2018)

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