Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Spinde, Timo
• Jeggle, Christin
• Haupt, Magdalena
• Gaissmaier, Wolfgang
• Giese, Helge
• Baker, Rogis

Titel

How do we raise media bias awareness effectively? Effects of visualizations to communicate bias

Ist Teil von

• PloS one, 2022-04, Vol.17 (4), p.e0266204-e0266204

Ort / Verlag

United States: Public Library of Science

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Quelle

EZB-FREE-00999 freely available EZB journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Media bias has a substantial impact on individual and collective perception of news. Effective communication that may counteract its potential negative effects still needs to be developed. In this article, we analyze how to facilitate the detection of media bias with visual and textual aids in the form of (a) a forewarning message, (b) text annotations, and (c) political classifiers. In an online experiment, we randomized 985 participants to receive a biased liberal or conservative news article in any combination of the three aids. Meanwhile, their subjective perception of media bias in this article, attitude change, and political ideology were assessed. Both the forewarning message and the annotations increased media bias awareness, whereas the political classification showed no effect. Incongruence between an articles' political position and individual political orientation also increased media bias awareness. Visual aids did not mitigate this effect. Likewise, attitudes remained unaltered.