A newsroom’s political makeup affects public trust, study finds

A new study suggests that revealing the political affiliations of a newsroom’s journalists can influence public trust and engagement. The research, published in Communication Research, found that people report higher trust in news outlets they perceive as politically balanced or those that provide no political information about their staff, compared to outlets dominated by one party.

The motivation for this research stems from the steady decline of public trust in the news media within the United States. Scholars and journalists alike have been exploring ways to rebuild this confidence, with a particular focus on the concept of journalistic transparency. The idea is that by being more open about how news is gathered and produced, outlets can signal their honesty and integrity to the public. This openness can serve as a mental shortcut, or heuristic, that helps people decide whether a source is credible.

The researchers wanted to test a specific and rarely examined form of transparency: disclosing the collective political leanings of the journalists working at a news outlet. They sought to understand if this information would help or hinder trust and whether people’s own political identities would shape their reactions.

To investigate this question, the researchers conducted a series of three online experiments. In each experiment, participants were shown a brief description of a news outlet. They were then randomly assigned to see different versions of a graphic that displayed the political composition of that outlet’s newsroom. After viewing the description and graphic, participants answered questions designed to measure their trust in the outlet, their intention to use it for news in the future, and their intention to actively avoid it.

The first experiment focused on political ideology. Participants were shown information about a real news program, The National Desk, and were assigned to one of four conditions. One group received no information about the journalists’ politics, serving as a control. A second group was told the newsroom was perfectly balanced with an equal number of liberal and conservative journalists. The third and fourth groups were told the newsroom had a large majority of either liberal journalists or conservative journalists.

The results showed that participants had significantly higher trust in the outlet when it was presented as balanced or when no political information was provided. Correspondingly, they reported a greater willingness to use these outlets and a lower intention to avoid them. There was no meaningful difference in trust between the balanced outlet and the one with no political information disclosed.

This initial experiment also revealed a powerful pattern related to partisanship. Democrats and Republicans both expressed much lower trust in the outlet that was dominated by the opposing ideology. For example, Democrats rated the conservative-majority newsroom as far less trustworthy, while Republicans felt the same way about the liberal-majority newsroom. This points to a strong “out-group bias,” where people are quick to distrust a source associated with a political group they oppose.

However, the study did not find evidence of an “in-group favoritism.” Democrats did not trust the liberal-majority outlet any more than the balanced or unaffiliated one, and Republicans showed a similar lack of preference for the conservative-majority outlet.

The second experiment extended these ideas by focusing on party affiliation rather than general ideology. The design was similar, but this time the breakdown included Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. A fifth condition was added to test perceptions of a newsroom with a majority of Independent journalists.

The findings from this experiment closely mirrored the first. People reported the most trust in the outlets that were politically balanced, had a majority of Independents, or provided no partisan information at all. The outlets with a clear Democratic or Republican majority were trusted significantly less. Again, the pattern of out-group dislike was strong among both Democrats and Republicans, with no accompanying favoritism for their own party’s newsroom.

The third and final experiment was designed to confirm that these effects were not tied to the specific name of the news program used in the first two studies. The researchers replicated the second experiment’s design but used a fictional news organization called the Independent News Network, a name pre-tested to be seen as neutral.

The results were consistent for a third time. This replication strengthens the conclusion that it is the information about the political composition of the newsroom, not a pre-existing perception of an outlet’s brand, that drives these judgments about trust. The studies also consistently showed that trust acted as the key mechanism. When people perceived an outlet as less trustworthy because of its partisan slant, that decrease in trust directly led to their intentions to avoid the outlet and not use it in the future.

The researchers note some limitations to their work. The studies presented a hypothetical situation, as news organizations do not typically publicize the partisan breakdown of their staff, which means the experiments may not perfectly reflect real-world behavior. The study also measured general perceptions of an outlet without providing participants with any specific news articles, and people’s reactions might change depending on the topic of the news.

Future research could explore whether these findings hold when applied to well-known media brands, which people already have strong opinions about. It could also examine how people react to specific news stories when they are aware of the political leanings of the newsroom that produced them.

The study, “In Diversity We Trust? Examining the Effect of Political Newsroom Diversity on Media Trust, Use, and Avoidance,” was authored by Eliana DuBosar, Jay D. Hmielowski, and Muhammad Ehab Rasul.