Evaluating Differences in Trust toward Audio- versus Text-Based Modes of News

• In Event: The Drivers and Variations of Media Trust and Distrust

Abstract

How does the mode in which the news is delivered (audio, text, etc.) affect the way the public views reporting as trustworthy and/or unbiased? Do efforts to humanize journalists build trust or undermine it? When the identities of individual journalists delivering the news are made more salient, does it help the public to form closer bonds (as in Robinson, 2023) or contribute to perceptions that the reporting is subjective and biased—especially among audiences who associate gender and racial identities with latent political orientations (see, for example, Crowder-Meyer et al., 2020; Ono & Burden, 2019)?

The present study uses two preregistered experiments in which respondents are asked to engage with examples of actual news stories—varying key characteristics of how the stories are delivered. The first study uses actual recordings and online articles from a US public radio network to test for differences in engagement when listening to versus reading the same content, examining audience evaluations of journalism alongside biophysical data collected for heart rate variability and skin conductance (as in Soroka, Fournier, & Nir, 2019). The second study uses an online survey embedded with radio recording stimuli where identical stories are altered such that the presenters’ gender and racial identities are experimentally manipulated, isolating the effects of the identity markers associated with the voices delivering the news.

Combined, these studies provide empirical evidence around the potential effectiveness—and backfire effects—associated with approaches to building trust with the public that foreground the identities of the individual journalists behind the news. At a time in which trust is declining and/or politically polarized (Gottfried & Liedke, 2021), with many presuming that even ostensibly neutral journalists hold ulterior political motives (Mont’Alverne et al., 2023; Nelson & Lewis, 2022), understanding how different formats of news shape the ideas people hold about the reliability and quality of journalism has taken on growing importance. While researchers have studied how digital platform affordances or media mode attributes (Eveland, 2003) may alter perceptions of incivility (Mutz, 2015; Rains et al., 2017; Sydnor, 2018), perceptions about the trustworthiness of news delivered via different modes has not previously been studied.

Preliminary results from Study 1 suggest that audio- versus text-based news is associated with stronger affective and physiological responses, but also increased skepticism among audiences who hold preconceptions or prejudices—groups that tend to be most distrusting of news in the US already. By varying the identities of the journalists in Study 2, this experiment will assess potential unintended consequences that come from making individual journalist’ identities more visible to the public. These findings will help guide future research on declining trust in news and the role that ideological stereotypes may play in shaping how the public thinks about the news they encounter.

References

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Mont’Alverne, C., Badrinathan, S., Ross Arguedas, A., Toff, B., Fletcher, R., & Nielsen, R. K. (2023). “Fair and Balanced”: What News Audiences in Four Countries Mean When They Say They Prefer Impartial News. Journalism Studies 24(9), 1131-1148.

Mutz, D. C. (2015). In-your-face politics: The consequences of uncivil media. Princeton University Press.

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Rains, S. A., Kenski, K., Coe, K., & Harwood, J. (2017). Incivility and political identity on the Internet: Intergroup factors as predictors of incivility in discussions of news online. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 22(4), 163-178.

Robinson, S. (2023). How Journalists Engage: A Theory of Trust Building, Identities, and Care. Oxford University Press.

Soroka, S., Fournier, P., & Nir, L. (2019). Cross-national evidence of a negativity bias in psychophysiological reactions to news. PNAS, 116(38), 18888-18892.

Sydnor, E. (2018). Platforms for incivility: Examining perceptions across different media formats. Political Communication, 35(1), 97-116.

Authors

• Benjamin Toff, University of Minnesota

• Nick Mathews, University of Minnesota