Media Cynicism, Media Skepticism and Automatic Media Trust: Explicating Their Connection with News Processing and Exposure

IF 4.9 1区文学 Q1 COMMUNICATION

Communication Research Pub Date : 2025-03-26 DOI:10.1177/00936502251327717

Yariv Tsfati, Aviv Barnoy

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

In an era of increasing attention to media trust, some have argued that differentiating between media cynicism and media skepticism (as both attitudinal and behavioral concepts) can advance a more nuanced understanding of media trust and its implications. While previous efforts conceptualized cynicism and skepticism as separate discrete phenomena, this allows the seemingly illogical possibility that some people would score high on both cynicism and skepticism. Additionally, these previous studies failed to demonstrate whether media cynicism and skepticism actually matter for audience reading and processing of news media content. After conceptualizing these terms on a single continuum varying between automatic rejection to automatic trust, Study 1 offers a procedure to test whether cynics process news stories faster, and whether skeptics’ trust in different news stories varies more compared to cynics’. Given that skepticism was hypothesized to reflect more deliberate thinking, we also tested whether media skeptics provide different kinds of justifications when asked to explain their evaluations of specific news stories, compared to cynics and trustors. Studies 2 and 3 test theoretically-driven hypotheses about automatic-trust, skepticism and cynicism and find that cynics’ and automatic trustors’ general evaluations of media are based on partisan reasoning and skeptics’ evaluation of the media is independent from their political ideology. Skeptical audiences were also found to consume more news and from a diversity of sources.

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来源期刊

Communication Research COMMUNICATION-

CiteScore

17.10

自引率

0.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： Empirical research in communication began in the 20th century, and there are more researchers pursuing answers to communication questions today than at any other time. The editorial goal of Communication Research is to offer a special opportunity for reflection and change in the new millennium. To qualify for publication, research should, first, be explicitly tied to some form of communication; second, be theoretically driven with results that inform theory; third, use the most rigorous empirical methods; and fourth, be directly linked to the most important problems and issues facing humankind. Critieria do not privilege any particular context; indeed, we believe that the key problems facing humankind occur in close relationships, groups, organiations, and cultures.