'Is it the Message or the Messenger?' Perceived News Accuracy and Partisan Media Outlets in the US

Scholarly debate about fake news revolves around the characteristics that a news needs to have to be perceived as accurate by the citizens. Several studies have shown that a news consistent with an individual’s prior believes is more likely to be regarded as accurate because of partisan motivated reasoning - the widespread tendency to favor identity-consistent and reject identity-threatening information. However, in a politically polarized media environment, where media outlets are clearly aligned with political camps, we have three sources of potential dissonance: (1) the political leaning of the receiver of the news, (2) the in/out-group status of the source with respect to the receiver, and (3) the group-consistency of the content of the news. So far little research has considered the role of the sources of the news, let alone its interaction with the news content. By employing a randomized survey experiment on a Mechanical Turk sample of US citizens, our goal is to test whether and how the political leaning of a news and of the outlet publishing it affect people’s perceptions its accuracy. Respondents are thus exposed to four randomized real news, and are asked to rate the accuracy of a Facebook-like news headline portraying a Republican or Democrat leader in a negative manner, attributed to a media outlet known for its Democrat or Republican leaning. The study can help disentangling the individual mechanisms that govern citizens believes in political facts in an age of declining trust.