Competition for audience attention is fierce in this era of infinite scroll, with a seemingly endless array of information sources for readers to filter.

But new research in Science Advances suggests editors and reporters can get more readers to click their stories using this strategy: Write simple headlines.

Based on more than 30,000 experiments conducted by the Washington Post and Upworthy, the finding is an important reminder for news organizations. Past research suggests mainstream news outlets tend to use more complex wording than hyper-partisan outlets, which use shorter sentences and less formal language.

“Extreme news has already gotten the memo,” says Todd Rogers, one of the authors of the paper and a professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, where The Journalist’s Resource is housed.

But headline preference can be in the eye of the beholder. In fact, the authors find in follow-up surveys that professional journalists do not favor simple headlines, “suggesting that those writing the news may read it differently from those consuming it,” the authors write. This in contrast to past research indicating that other professionals, such as lawyers, prefer simple writing.

Here’s how Rogers and co-authors — Hillary Shulman, an associate professor of communication at The Ohio State University and David Markowitz, an associate professor of communication at Michigan State University — assess headline complexity:

• Whether the headline includes common words.
• Use (or not) of a formal, complex, analytic style.
• Readability, which accounts for words per sentence and syllables per word.
• Overall character count.

To measure common words and analytic writing the authors used statistical software called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. For readability and character count, they used text analysis packages in the statistical programming interface R.

The study doesn’t offer rules for headlines, such as writing at a particular reading grade level or staying below a certain character count.

But Rogers says the findings suggest a rule of thumb for journalists to consider: If you’re choosing between two headlines, where both make sense, are accurate and otherwise equal, choose the less complex one.

In the newsroom, gauging simplicity can be subjective. Rogers recommends journalists choose words that are shorter, more common and that they aim for simple grammatical construction when writing headlines.

Thousands of headline tests at the Washington Post and Upworthy

Readers may not be aware that the headlines they see on a news website could be different from what another reader sees. News outlets often test headlines to gauge which one audiences prefer. These are called A/B tests — a portion of site visitors get headline A, others get headline B.

The authors obtained all headline tests the Washington Post ran from March 3, 2021 to December 18, 2022. In total, they analyzed nearly 20,000 headlines, the popularity of which was determined by the click-through rate, or the percentage of people who clicked on that headline.

Some of the Washington Post headline tests included three or four headlines for a single story. Regardless of the content of the headline, the authors’ analysis links simpler headlines with higher click rates.

While Rogers notes that “the effect is not gigantic” he says crafting simpler headlines “will disproportionately help those who are not doing it, which is the non-extremist news.”

The authors note in the paper that because of the large size of the Washington Post’s readership, even a small percentage bump in click rates could mean tens of thousands more reads.

And simple headlines are not necessarily shorter, the research finds. While using common words, an informal style and better readability were associated with higher click rates, character count was not.

For example, this Washington Post headline, about Oprah Winfrey’s March 2021 interview with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, has 14 words:

“Meghan and Harry are talking to Oprah. Here’s why they shouldn’t say too much.”

The authors’ analysis finds it is less complex than this 13-word version:

“Are Meghan and Harry spilling royal tea to Oprah? Don’t bet on it.”

The authors did the same analysis with headline tests from Upworthy conducted January 2013 to April 2015 across more than 105,000 headlines.

The conclusion was the same.

“Thousands of field experiments across traditional (i.e., The Washington Post) and nontraditional news sites (i.e., Upworthy) showed that news readers are more likely to click on and engage with simple headlines than complex ones,” the authors write.

Audiences and journalists see headlines differently

In two follow-up surveys the authors aimed to explore whether the results of the headline tests held up in a controlled setting and whether professional news makers also prefer simple headlines.

In early May 2023, the authors recruited 524 people from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and assessed whether they more closely read simple or complex headlines. Participants were roughly equally split between men and women, with about 77% identifying as white, 11% Black, 7% Asian, 1% American Indian or Alaska Native and 3% multiracial.

They were shown 10 headlines and asked to pick one they’d click on a news site.

Within that set, participants saw four “target” and six “control” headlines. The target headlines were either simple or complex. All participants saw the same control headlines.

Participants were split into two treatment groups: either four simple or four complex headlines. Those who saw simple headlines picked one of them 34.8% of the time, compared with 15.3% for control headlines.

But when participants got the complex headlines, they picked one of them 22.2% of the time, compared with 27.7% for the controls.

Participants were also presented with a three-word phrase and asked to recall whether the phrase had appeared in the headlines. They were more likely to recognize the three-word phrase within simpler headlines.

“[T]he finding that readers engage less deeply with complex writing has important practical implications,” the authors write. “Specifically, writing simply can help news creators increase audience engagement even for stories that are themselves complicated.”

For the second survey, 249 participants were recruited from a September 2023 webinar about strategies for people writing for busy readers, which Rogers led and The Journalist’s Resource presented.

All participants identified as professional writers and most were current or former journalists with about 14 years of experience, on average. They were presented with the same headlines and asked the same questions as participants in the other survey.

The authors write that the findings of this survey represented a “notable departure” from the other findings. The writers and journalists surveyed did not prefer simpler headlines over complex ones, and they were much better at recalling whether the three-word phrase appeared in both simple and complex headlines.

“They’re not deterred by cognitive complexity,” Rogers says. “They don’t have the same intuitions or experiences reading as normal news readers.”

That, Rogers adds, is a main takeaway for journalists: Be aware that your experience and your audiences’ experience when interpreting headlines may be leagues apart — and lean into simplicity.

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Pop quiz: Which of these headlines appeared atop a real news story?

(A) Zelenskyy pleads to US Congress: ‘We need you right now’

(B) Biden signed bill to mandate climate change curriculum in all K-8 classrooms

If you answered A, you’re correct — and not alone.

About 3 in 4 adults in the U.S. can discern real political news headlines from fake ones, finds a new paper, “Is Journalistic Truth Dead? Measuring How Informed Voters Are About Political News,” forthcoming in the American Economic Review.

The findings are based on a dozen quizzes completed by a total of nearly 8,000 participants representative of the national population, conducted by Charles Angelucci, an assistant professor of applied economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Andrea Prat, an economics professor at Columbia University, from June 2019 to March 2022.

Angelucci and Prat find participants selected the real headlines 75% of the time, on average. While participants overall were much more likely than not to pick the true headline, demographic factors, not partisanship, were a stronger predictor of avoiding fake news, according to a subsequent statistical analysis the authors conducted. For example, younger, less educated people are less likely to pick true headlines, compared with those who are older and have a bachelor’s degree or higher.

And if you answered B above, don’t worry. That headline was written by a real journalist and meant to be plausible — but it never happened. President Joe Biden did not sign a bill mandating that educators teach climate change in elementary schools.

Both answers are from a quiz Angelucci and Prat conducted in March 2022. Participants had one minute to record which headlines they thought were true and which were fabricated.

“The average person is very well capable of distinguishing mainstream real news,” says Angelucci.

The findings “cast doubt” on media narratives that objective truth is dying, write Angelucci and Prat.

“It’s a really impressive paper, and the most comprehensive and rigorous study I’ve seen that assesses the level of knowledge, the level of news knowledge, in the mass public,” says Andy Guess, assistant professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University, who was not involved with the research but provided early feedback.

Angelucci and Prat recruited four journalists to create the fake headlines. The journalists came from television, radio and local newspapers. They also selected the real headlines used in the surveys, drawn from Reuters wire articles on U.S. politics and based on the journalists’ judgment of their editorial significance.

(The last survey, conducted in March 2022, was drawn from Associated Press stories, because Reuters went behind a paywall in April 2021.)

Specifically, Angelucci and Prat instructed the journalists to put on their editor-in-chief hats: Pick the most important stories in U.S. politics to cover in a given week. The paper succeeds in creating a procedure that can be used in future research, Guess says, in relying on journalists to select a sample of newsworthy, real articles published by a global news outlet that covers nearly every notable political and policy event.

Coming up with a well-defined, replicable procedure to sample articles has been “one of the key challenges,” in analyzing news knowledge, Guess says.

Trouble identifying truth across socioeconomic groups

The three most recent survey rounds, conducted in October 2020, February 2021 and March 2022, included two quizzes each. One quiz offered three real headlines and three fabricated headlines created by the journalists. The other quiz had three real headlines and three fake headlines that circulated online, provided by fact checking site Snopes.

The real headlines appeared between May 2019 and March 2022, and were presented to participants within weeks or days of publication. Overall, the average fake headline, whether created by the journalists or from Snopes, was selected by participants 25% of the time, on average.

Angelucci and Prat then used the data they collected to build statistical models to explore differences in people’s ability to evaluate news across socioeconomic and partisan lines. Survey participants were drawn from panels convened by polling firm YouGov, which provides participants’ demographic information, such as age, family income, education and race or ethnicity, along with political party affiliation.

Statistical modeling is a fairly common way social scientists analyze survey results. It allows them to control for what are called latent characteristics — things researchers cannot observe, such as how plausible individual participants perceived the true and fake news headlines to be.

Based on the model, white, college-educated men under age 52, with relatively high incomes, had the highest odds, 89%, of choosing the correct answer when presented with a true and a false headline. Women under age 52 with lower incomes and education levels who were racial or ethnic minorities had the lowest odds, 71%, of selecting the true headline.

Despite the stark difference between some socioeconomic groups, even those more likely to select the fake headline still had a good chance of picking the true headline.

“They’re still more likely to get it right than wrong,” Angelucci says.

Those more politically engaged and likely to vote, who also tend to be older and have a college education, are more likely to choose the true headline, according to the model.

“We don’t know why young people are not as well informed as older people,” Angelucci says. “But age is the single most important predictor of knowledge.”

Angelucci notes, however, that social media confounds this trend, because “people who go on social media tend to be less informed than the general population,” he says.

The analytic results suggest partisanship is not a major factor in discerning true headlines. Overall, the model indicates people presented with one true and one fake headline have an 83% chance of picking the true headline when the news was positive about their political party — that ticked down just two percentage points, to 81%, when the news was unfavorable to their party.

Recognizing truth in a ‘post-truth’ world

The idea that Americans are living in a “post-truth world” gained some immediate currency during the second half of the 2010s, though the idea has existed since at least the 1990s. Angelucci and Prat write that the phrases “death of truth” and “post-truth world” have become “commonplace” in popular books and other media, “and are often accompanied by calls for immediate action to counter this risk.”

The post-truth narrative rose amid a tempest of political upheaval, exemplified by the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, and technological upheaval, in the form of proliferating social media allowing unfettered self-publishing of dangerous conspiracies.

While it is difficult to narrow down a precise and widely accepted definition of “post-truth,” the phrase “especially refers to a sociopolitical condition perceived as rifer than ever before with dishonesty and distrust, inaccuracies or false knowledge, all corresponding to a crisis of shared trusted adjudicating authorities,” writes Jayson Harsin, an associate professor of communication, media and culture at the American University of Paris, in a December 2018 paper in the journal Communication.

The post-truth world that fascinated many in the news media during the waning years of the 2010s was aptly captured by Barack Obama during the waning days of his presidency. In a November 2016 article, Obama told New Yorker editor David Remnick that “the capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal — that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation.”

In her 2018 book, “The Death of Truth,” former New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani likewise wondered: “How did truth and reason become such endangered species, and what does their impending demise portend for our public discourse and the future of our politics and governance?”

When Kakutani’s book was released, Trump was making nearly six misleading claims per day, according to a Washington Post tally. Those misleading claims were being shared to varying degrees across social media.

One literature review, published in November 2021 in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, identified several analyses indicating that the proliferation of social media has contributed to political polarization.

While the new paper does not eliminate questions on what it means to live in a post-truth society, it does suggest, at some basic level, that many Americans are yet able to agree on the truth and falsity of political news.

Angelucci doesn’t dispute that polarization is real. What’s interesting for future research, and troubling at the same time, he says, is what truth means.

“It must be that we just — it’s not so much interpret the information differently, though that, too,” he says. “We literally think about the world differently. And so, throwing information at people, unfortunately, will not solve the problem.”

3 tips for covering political misinformation online

Guess, the Princeton professor, has extensively studied how social media use influences the U.S. electorate, including how algorithms and reshares affect political polarization in recent papers published in Science.

For journalists covering online misinformation, he offers three tips based on his research and other studies on misinformation.

1. Be specific about who is exposed to misinformation and avoid overplaying the extent to which misinformation affects all voters.

Certain segments of the voting population are “awash” in misinformation or, at least, are readily exposed to “news content that is produced by untrustworthy sources that lack standards of journalistic verification,” he says.

For example, fake news tends to circulate most among people over age 65, as well as those who are more politically conservative. While these trends are not fixed and could change in the coming years, they have held since around the mid-2010s.

“The misinformation problem is often stated in very general terms,” Guess says. “In other words, as if misinformation is equally likely to be seen by anyone on social media.”

2. Think of misinformation as a supply and demand equation, and not necessarily the end of the world as we know it.

There is clearly demand among some individuals and groups for false information, Guess says. Why do people seek out information that aligns with their politics, even if that information is untrue?

There are also clearly a host of people and groups willing to produce it.

“Every time there’s a new technological development, like generative AI, the tendency is to frame it as a sort of, all-encompassing technology that’s going to manipulate a passive public without their awareness,” Guess says. “I’m not ruling out that something like that could happen, but I think often the assumption that will happen is sort of baked into the coverage, as opposed to just looking at the nuts and bolts of, who is producing it, what the reach is, and what the impact will be on real people’s news diets?”

3. Give context and remember that denominators are your friend.

Numbers are often reported without context, Guess observes. Say a piece of misinformation created by a Russian troll farm was shared on X, formerly Twitter, a million times. How does that compare with the total number of shares on X over a given time frame, or to shares of real news across the platform?

“You need to take the denominator into account,” Guess says. “And think about also the perspective of individual users. What proportion of their daily news diet are we talking about? And it’s probably just a miniscule fraction. If journalists think these numbers are important, then context is really critical.”

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U.S. news organizations and the public often clash over the role the media should play in society, but many reporters, editors and news consumers view journalists as watchdogs — especially when it comes to holding elected officials accountable.

A recent paper published in The International Journal of Press/Politics is among the first to explore associations between local news coverage and criminal corruption charges brought against public officials.

The authors find prosecutions for public corruption are more likely in U.S. communities served by a nonprofit news outlet, a relatively new business model that often aims to fill the void left by shuttered traditional local newspapers.

Defining watchdog journalism

News outlets don’t have to do deep investigative reporting to be watchdogs, says Nikki Usher, lead author of the paper and an associate communications professor at the University of San Diego.

Watchdog journalism is “the kind of public interest journalism that keeps regular watch on public institutions, lawmakers and businesses,” Usher explains. “That kind of removes the narrow focus on investigative journalism, because you can have watchdog journalism that never really breaks into an investigative mode.”

University of Cardiff professor Bob Franklin, founding editor of several academic journals that analyze the news media, wrote in a 2005 journalism textbook that “the watchdog metaphor imbues the press with the role of being a forum for discussion, investigators of impropriety, an adversary to monopoly over power and knowledge and the defenders of truth, freedom and democracy.”

Journalism, as an institution, does not always act as a watchdog, and particular news outlets or reporters may not be interested in striving for such status.

Yet the watchdog role remains an ideal for many news organizations in the U.S., where voters cast ballots based on their understanding of candidate policies, proclivities and scandals.

Nonprofit news organizations are increasingly offering an alternative model that often allows for editorial autonomy while employing reporters driven by a watchdog mission who do award-winning work along the way. For example, nonprofit news site Mississippi Today last year uncovered a $77 million welfare scandal involving former Gov. Phil Bryant and Pro Football Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre. Reporter Anna Wolfe won the Pulitzer Prize and the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.

Legacy newspaper staffing in the U.S. fell from 71,000 employees in 2008 to 31,000 in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. The internet disintegrated classified ad revenue over the past two decades, making the for-profit news model less viable for local and regional news outlets.

Nonprofit news sites, many of them digital-only, have stepped in to partially fill the void. National, regional or local nonprofit news outlets in the U.S. have grown in recent years, from fewer than 25 in 2009 to nearly 400 as of May 2023, according to an industry report by the Institute for Nonprofit News, a consortium of nonprofit news outlets. Digital-first INN member organizations employ 4,000 people nationally, with an average of five staffers — editorial and non-editorial — per outlet, according to the report.

Watchdog: Analysis of nonprofit news and corruption prosecutions

Usher and coauthor Sanghoon Kim-Leffingwell, a senior lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, started their analysis by looking at corruption-related prosecutions, such as bribery or obstruction of justice, against federal, local or state officials or other government workers across all 94 federal court districts in the U.S. from 2003 to 2019.

They also look at newspaper employment numbers and circulation by county, along with the presence of nonprofit news outlets that are INN members, plus figures on philanthropic donations to those nonprofit outlets, drawn from data compiled by Media Impact Funders, a membership organization for foundations and individuals that fund news organizations.

“What’s kind of the unique contribution of this paper, that I think really we have not seen before, is it asks, ‘How are these nonprofit news outlets supplementing public life’?” explains Usher. “And we find a really strong connection that they’re able to maintain accountability in these communities. And, actually, the better funded you are the more of a difference you’re able to make.”

The authors use newspaper employment data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics as a measure of the supply of news in a given county, while the circulation data is meant to get at demand for news.

The presence of an INN member organization “is a broader proxy for the commitment to alternative, philanthropic funding for journalism in an area,” Usher and Kim-Leffingwell write in their paper, “How Loud Does the Watchdog Bark? A Reconsideration of Losing Local Journalism, News Nonprofits, and Political Corruption.”

Key findings

The authors did not find a statistically significant relationship between overall newspaper employment in a judicial district and public corruption prosecutions. But they did learn prosecutions were more likely in judicial districts where there was relatively high demand for news, as measured by newspaper circulation.

Prosecutions for corruption also rise after a nonprofit news outlet is established within a judicial district, and prosecutions are more likely in districts where those outlets enjoy greater philanthropic funding.

“It seems reliable, like a really high-quality finding, that you see more prosecution of public officials — that’s really interesting to me,” says Meghan Rubado, an associate professor of urban studies at Cleveland State University who researches how news coverage affects civic institutions but was not involved with the recent paper.

“I would love to come up with a way to explore this in future research, whether public officials view these independent, nonprofit-funded newsrooms as anything to take seriously,” adds Rubado, who worked as a reporter at the Syracuse Post-Standard in New York from 2004 to 2010. “Maybe local officials or public officials more generally are less likely to change their behavior when the newsroom watching them is an independent nonprofit than when it’s a traditional newspaper.”

Usher and Kim-Leffingwell write that their findings offer partial evidence that local news outlets succeed in their role as public watchdogs. But watchdog journalists, they write, can only illuminate corruption. What happens next is outside the scope of the watchdog journalist’s role.

“Journalism cannot act on behalf of the public to sanction bad actors; journalists can only expose wrongdoing and hope that the public, in turn, acts accordingly — either voting someone out of office or hoping that other public stakeholders exact criminal or civil sanctions,” they write.  

Prior research on journalism and civic engagement

The recent paper builds on past research exploring the relationship between news and civics, a field of study that has grown since the widespread decline of for-profit local news.

In “Paper Cuts: How Reporting Resources Affect Political News Coverage,” published in October 2020 in the American Journal of Political Science, Rice University assistant professor of political science Erik Peterson looks at the relationship between newsroom staff cuts and local political coverage.

Across Peterson’s sample of 70 U.S. newspapers covering national, state and local politics from 1994 to 2014, every loss of 12 reporters was associated with 500 fewer political news stories each year.

“Although prior research focuses on how media outlets alter their coverage in anticipation of economic challenges, this account more fully details the consequences when these efforts fall short,” Peterson writes.

Another paper exploring the journalism-civics nexus is “Political Consequences of the Endangered Local Watchdog: Newspaper Decline and Mayoral Elections in the United States,” published in April 2019 in Urban Affairs Review. In it, Rubado and Jay Jennings, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, examine whether the presence of well-staffed local news organizations affects mayoral races.

For many cities and towns, the outcomes of mayoral elections can shape local government policies and programs for years. The dataset Rubado and Jennings developed includes 11 newspapers serving 46 cities in California, from Oroville in the north down to Solvang, roughly two and a half hours west of Los Angeles. They focus on 246 mayoral elections held from 1994 to 2016 — a period when local newsrooms nationally suffered major staffing cuts.

They find less political competition in cities with newspapers that severely cut staff — when newsrooms shrink, fewer candidates run for mayor. They also find smaller margins of victory for mayoral winners in areas with relatively more reporters.

“One way that quality candidates emerge is through vigorous and rigorous coverage of local government,” says Rubado. “So, when local government is perceived to not be doing a good job, you get quality challengers trying to unseat an ineffective public official.”

Usher, lead author of the recent paper on nonprofit journalism, maintains that even if a nonprofit news outlet has a fraction of the reach that a traditional newspaper used to have, it still provides a crucial civic function and helps drive the local news agenda.

“An open question that’s going to depend on each nonprofit is how well integrated they are into a local community’s existing media infrastructure,” Usher says. “Is one of these nonprofits regularly pumping coverage into local televisions, local newspapers? That’s what gives reach to the ordinary public.”

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A few years ago, the American Economic Review published research showing when Fox News and other cable networks have a low channel number — say, channel 25 instead of channel 65 — people watch more.

New research builds on those findings, revealing important consequences for criminal defendants in counties where Fox News is easy to find in the cable guide.

Specifically, counties with high exposure to Fox News tend to elect judges who impose harsh criminal sentences, finds the research, which analyzes 7 million prison sentencing decisions from 2005 to 2017.

The paper, “Conservative News Media and Criminal Justice: Evidence from Exposure to Fox News Channel,” is the latest in a small but growing literature on the relationship between media viewership and criminal court outcomes.

“This Fox News effect, it’s not just changing discourse, it’s not just changing voting, it actually has some local policy impacts,” says Elliot Ash, one of the paper’s authors and an assistant professor of law, economics and data science ETH Zurich, a public research university in Switzerland. “Of course, it’s a very high stakes and expensive outcome. Criminal sentencing is a really costly decision and outcome so it’s important to see if media can influence that.”

Ash and co-author Michael Poyker, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Nottingham, link more Fox News viewership with longer sentences in particular for defendants convicted of crimes involving illegal drugs.

Ash and Poyker also identify harsher sentences for Black defendants, compared with white or Hispanic defendants, in counties where Fox News is especially popular.

With Black people “disproportionately arrested for non-violent drug-related offenses, the effect could be driven by racial bias in media messaging,” Ash and Poyker write. “Alternatively, it could be that ‘tough-on-drugs’ rather than ‘tough-on-crime’ rhetoric matters in this setting.”

Harsher sentences stemming from Fox News viewership holds only for elected judges, not appointed ones, find Ash and Poyker.

This effect plays out in two ways.

First, “tough-on-crime” judges running for the first time may have the upper hand over opponents who favor more moderate sentencing.

Second, judges already in office may, over time, begin to hand down harsher sentences in response to local voters who favor “tough-on-crime” judges because Fox News programs concentrating on that message are easy to find in their cable guides.

This finding mirrors other recent research that has found judges change their sentencing behavior based on political and other outside influences.

Appointed judges, by contrast, are tenured and less susceptible to public perceptions driven by Fox News viewership, Ash and Poyker write.

“Rather than shifting the policy preferences of judges directly, Fox News affects judge decisions by shifting voter attitudes, which then influence judges through the electoral process,” they write.

The paper is conditionally accepted for publication in a forthcoming issue of The Economic Journal. The content of the paper is unlikely to change before it is published in the coming months and the journal will first have to replicate the findings, Ash says.

Fox News viewership and policy preferences

Ash and Poyker also analyze Gallup survey data from 2010 to 2016 and find respondents think drug crime is an important policy issue in counties where Fox News is popular because it has a low channel number and is easy to find in the cable guide.

With more Fox News viewership linked to harsher sentences for people convicted of drug crimes, “we can draw a causal chain from Fox News exposure to voter attitudes to the behaviors of elected judges,” they write.

Ash and Poyker rule out several other potential explanations for harsher crime sentencing. For example, they do not find that prosecutors bring more serious charges because of local Fox News viewership and neither does viewership affect local crime rates.

“Future work could build on this evidence to explore further how media influences inter-group attitudes,” the authors conclude. “Using more localized and fine-grained data on racial attitudes over time would be a promising first step.”

Fox News channel position: A natural experiment

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Two recent studies shed light on how Americans receive and act on monetary policy information, such as inflation forecasts, from the Federal Reserve.

One paper indicates the news media has not been the most effective vehicle for Americans to receive policy pronouncements from the nation’s central bank. Its key takeaway: People’s inflation expectations more closely align with reality when they consider official Federal Reserve statements conveying inflation forecasts, rather than news articles covering those statements.

People also adjust their spending patterns based on their inflation expectations, the research finds. If they think prices will go up in the future, they spend more now.

The other paper shows that certain racial minorities and women trust some leaders at the nation’s central bank more than others. Its key takeaway: Unemployment expectations of Black people and women more closely align with reality when they receive unemployment forecasts from Federal Reserve leaders who look like them.

It’s yet more evidence that trusted messengers matter in different contexts, including politics, health and economics. Both studies offer food for thought for business journalists considering who their audiences are and how to report on monetary policy.

The rise of ‘forward guidance’ on inflation forecasts and other monetary policy

Financial markets have historically been the main audience for Federal Reserve policy communications, according to the authors of “Monetary Policy Communications and their Effects on Household Inflation Expectations,” forthcoming in the Journal of Political Economy.

The U.S. central bank strives to telegraph its policy moves, such as interest rate hikes, to sellers and buyers of bonds, equities and loans — and firms that provide analytics and forecasting to help investors predict how those markets will move.

“Forward guidance” refers to the Federal Reserve’s communication with the public about its intentions. The central bank has used forward guidance since the early 2000s. But transparency wasn’t always in fashion at the Federal Reserve. Former Chair Alan Greenspan tried to avoid rattling markets through opacity, rather than clarity. In 1987 he told Congress: “Since I’ve become a central banker, I’ve learned to mumble with great incoherence. If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.”

Greater transparency arrived after markets reacted poorly to unexpected policy announcements. For example, Greenspan in early 1994 issued a brief statement explaining the central bank would raise interest rates for the first time since 1989. Back then, the Federal Reserve’s communication to the public was almost non-existent, compared with today. Minutes from key meetings were not released until months later, and the Federal Reserve did not issue statements following meetings. (Minutes are now released about two weeks after major meetings.)

In fact, Greenspan had never before issued a post-meeting statement, according to a 2015 FEDS Notes article. Investors didn’t see the statement or the rate increase coming. They read Greenspan’s statement, and other data releases during the year, as indicating higher inflation and slower economic growth ahead. Interest rates on certain Treasury bonds increased from roughly 5.7% in January 1994 to 7.9% in November — a 39% rise over the course of the year following three years of monthly yields trending downward.

Investors were telling the government that if the economy was going to slow down and the dollar was going to lose value relatively quickly, they wanted better returns for their bond purchases. This is one example of why the Federal Reserve now actively tries to avoid spooking markets and has expanded its public communication efforts.

The central bank in recent weeks has been saying it will likely raise interest rates following a meeting of top leaders scheduled for mid-March, and perhaps several times throughout the year, in order to combat high inflation that continues despite previous forecasts indicating rising prices would be “transitory.”

When journalists report that the Federal Reserve plans to raise interest rates, that’s referring to the central bank raising the federal funds rate. This is the interest rate commercial banks charge each other when they trade money held at Federal Reserve banks. Simply put, banks with extra cash lend to banks that need cash. Higher interest rates for consumers are an expected byproduct of raising the federal funds rate — it’s a calculated move from the central bank.

When interest rates are low, spending tends to go up. When rates are high, spending decreases. Adjusting the federal funds rate is a way for the central bank to influence the amount of money flowing through the economy — which is why the Federal Reserve cares that its forward guidance gets through the public, too.

Think of a homeowner planning to finish their basement. If it’s cheap to get a loan, the homeowner will likely move forward with the renovation. They’d hire a local contractor, spurring job growth. Painters, plumbers and carpenters doing the work would have more money in their pockets to spend on other goods and services.

But if it’s expensive to borrow money, the household might put off the renovation, at least until interest rates fall. The jobs that would have been created from the renovation never materialize in that moment. Businesses, too, are more willing to borrow to expand or hire workers when interest rates are low.

Through press releases and statements, the Federal Reserve has recently been telling financial markets it intends to tame inflation by pushing interest rates up so overall demand for goods and services cools down.

The Federal Reserve has been successful in communicating policy intentions to financial markets, in the sense that those markets do respond to forward guidance. According to a March 2021 paper in the Journal of Monetary Economics examining the effects of Federal Reserve announcements from July 1991 to June 2019, forward guidance and certain asset purchases “had substantial and highly statistically significant effects on Treasury yields, corporate bond yields, stock prices, and exchange rates, comparable in magnitude to the effects of the federal funds rate,” during economically stable periods.

But the central bank has been less successful in communicating to businesses and the general public, according to the authors of the forthcoming paper. In countries like the U.S. that typically enjoy low inflation, businesses and households “seem unaware of even dramatic monetary policy announcements, and more generally display almost no knowledge of what central banks do,” the authors write.

Survey takers trust the Fed more than traditional news

Federal Reserve communications to the public aim to “anchor” inflation expectations, meaning the general public should have an inflation number in mind that aligns with actual and proposed central bank policy.

“One way to think about anchoring expectations is you have high trust in a central bank,” explains Michael Weber, an associate professor of finance at the University of Chicago and an author of the forthcoming paper in the Journal of Political Economy. “And short-run expectations could be fluctuating, but in the long run, on average, the central bank will do its job and you can expect average inflation to be around 2%.”

To identify ways the Federal Reserve could better educate the public on its functions and policies, the authors conducted a randomized controlled trial in which they surveyed nearly 20,000 U.S. consumers reflective of the nation’s overall demographics. That’s a large sample for a consumer survey — the New York Federal Reserve’s monthly Survey of Consumer Expectations includes a rotating panel of 1,300 people, though it has the advantage of being regularly administered, so it captures changes over time.

The authors of the paper first asked participants what they thought inflation had been over the previous year. Then, they asked participants for their inflation forecast for the coming year. But before making predictions, eight groups received some additional information. A ninth control group received no extra information. Randomized controlled trials are rare in economic research, though they have become more popular over the past four years.

A roughly equal number of participants were randomly presented with one of the following pieces of information before making their inflation predictions:

• The actual inflation rate over the past year.
• The Federal Reserve’s general inflation target of 2%.
• A specific inflation forecast from the Federal Reserve.
• A longer statement from the central bank on inflation expectations.
• A USA Today article covering the Federal Reserve’s inflation forecast.
• Gas price inflation over the prior three months.
• The most recent unemployment numbers.
• U.S. population growth over the past three years — a non-economic data point acting as a placebo. The population growth figure was 2%. The idea was to see if being shown a figure identical but unrelated to the Federal Reserve’s target inflation rate would influence participants’ forecasts.

All of the above were real-world forecasts, statements and news stories. The survey took place in 2018, before the current spate of high inflation.

Setting expectations and educating people and businesses on how Federal Reserve policy works is particularly important when economic conditions change drastically. This is because perception matters when it comes to inflation. Some businesses place their orders weeks or months in advance. Those retailers take a best guess at how inflation might affect the number of goods they sell, and place their orders accordingly.

When inflation is stable, that guessing game is made a little easier. For now, Weber says, “people tend to put more weight on positive rather than negative price changes. Even if inflation went down now, people wouldn’t come down with their inflation expectations.” It’s a notion supported by Federal Reserve research.

All participants surveyed were also asked what they thought was the Federal Reserve’s ideal inflation rate, before receiving any additional information. Nearly 40% of respondents answered 10%, far off the actual answer of 2% and suggesting “a pervasive lack of knowledge on the part of households about the objectives of the Federal Reserve,” the authors write.

The groups receiving the first three treatments — the actual inflation rate over the past year, the Federal Reserve’s inflation target and the central bank’s inflation forecast for the coming year — reduced their inflation forecasts by about 1% compared with the control group.

Participants in the gas price group increased their inflation expectations by about 1.5% compared with the control group. (Gas prices had risen at an 11% clip over the three months before the survey.) The longer Federal Reserve statement also had a relatively large effect. That group reduced inflation expectations by about 1.2%. The unemployment rate information led to a downward revision of 0.3% among that group.

The placebo group, which received the information about recent population growth, reduced their inflation forecasts by about 0.3%, relative to the control group.

The USA Today group reduced their inflation expectations by about 0.5%, “less than half the effect of any of the other inflation-related treatments,” the authors write. Participants with relatively less education and less income, respectively, tended to especially give little credence the USA Today article. The authors continue:

“The major caveat is that relying on the media to transmit the central bank’s message is unlikely to be very successful: Not only do many households not follow news about monetary policy but even when exposed to news articles focusing explicitly on monetary policy decisions, these news articles seem to be heavily discounted by the public due to their source.”

In follow up surveys, inflation expectations of participants in any of the treatment groups halved three months later. Those inflation expectations fully converged with the control group six months on. In other words, information on inflation predictions at a single point in time had little lasting effect on participants’ inflation perceptions.

“These results suggest central banks cannot rely on one-off messages but have to develop a repeated communication strategy to the extent that central banks intend to manage consumer expectations through communication,” the authors write.

Because participants were recruited from the Nielsen Homescan Panel, the authors accessed retail scanner data on select items participants purchased, like food and other regular consumer goods, in the months after the survey. Generally, participants who expected higher inflation over the coming year spent more — meaning individuals’ own perceptions of future inflation affected their real-world spending. The authors also asked about spending in their follow up surveys and found similar results.

Why does the Fed target 2% inflation?

The Federal Reserve publicly adopted a target annual inflation rate of 2% in Jan. 2012 in order to “firmly anchor longer-term inflation expectations,” Kansas City Federal Reserve researchers Brent Bundick and A. Lee Smith wrote in March 2021. Inflation in the U.S. settled around 2% in the mid-1990s, and St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard has argued that the central bank behind the scenes has targeted that rate ever since. Explicit inflation targeting has been a global trend for central banks since the early 1990s, while 2% target inflation remains the “international standard,” Bullard wrote in Sept. 2018.  As Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell explained in an Aug. 2020 speech, inflation targeting “was also associated with increased communication and transparency designed to clarify the central bank’s policy intentions. This emphasis on transparency reflected what was then a new appreciation that policy is most effective when it is clearly understood by the public.” Indeed, the Federal Reserve in Jan. 2016 clarified in a statement that the 2% target is fluid. Fluctuations are normal, however the central bank would be “concerned if inflation were running persistently above or below this objective.” This is where monetary policy comes into play. When inflation is running hot, the Federal Reserve typically raises interest rates to try to bring inflation down closer to 2%. 

Messengers matter

Public trust is not just linked to how the Federal Reserve communicates but who is communicating. A Sept. 2021 National Bureau of Economic Research paper, “Diverse Policy Committees Can Reach Underrepresented Groups,” also uses a randomized controlled trial to explore which bank leaders are trusted public messengers.

Much news coverage has focused on the importance of trusted messengers during the pandemic, particularly around vaccine hesitancy. The same can hold true when it comes to how the public understands the health of the U.S. economy.

The authors used survey firm Qualtrics to recruit 9,140 participants broadly representative of the U.S. population by gender, age, education level and geography. Black adults were slightly over-represented to ensure the authors had enough data from that group to draw informative conclusions.  

Participants were first asked for their estimates of unemployment and inflation rates in the U.S. They were then shown Federal Reserve forecasts for those economic measures alongside a randomly selected picture, name and title of one of three system leaders:

• Tom Barkin, a white man in charge of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
• Raphael Bostic, a Black man who heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
• Mary Daly, a white woman and top leader at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

All three served as non-voting members during the June 2020 meeting of Federal Open Market Committee, which sets monetary policy for the country. The authors presented participants with forecasts from that meeting. A control group received a few lines about how the Federal Reserve operates and the demographic characteristics of regional and federal bank leadership.

There are no Hispanic people in equivalent leadership roles in the Federal Reserve System, so the authors could not test for that demographic group.

White women were more likely to report unemployment expectations more closely anchored to official forecasts when shown pictures of Bostic or Daly. The same held for Black participants, and the effects were “particularly large for Black women, who respond most strongly to Ms. Daly,” the authors write. Predictions from white men and Hispanic participants were largely unaffected by the messenger’s demographics.

“Crucially, women and African Americans, they become more interested in incorporating information from the Fed in their own economic plans moving forward, whereas the group over-represented before, white men, doesn’t react in a negative way,” says Boston College assistant professor of management Francesco D’Acunto, one of the authors of the paper along with Weber and Andreas Fuster, an associate professor of finance at the Swiss Finance Institute, EPFL.

Results for inflation expectations were by and large similar to the unemployment expectations, but the authors do not draw as definitive conclusions for that part of the study. The reason is that results for inflation expectations were less consistent. Some people’s inflation expectations were greatly affected by the messenger, while others not much at all. Whereas for unemployment predictions, entire groups — such as Black women — responded strongly.

“Inflation, until basically just a few months ago, was very, very low,” D’Acunto says. “People were not even thinking about the implications of inflation for their earnings and real versus nominal values. If we would replicate our study today that would be very interesting to see what happens, when people are much more aware now.”

The post Research: People trust inflation forecasts from the Fed more than traditional news stories about those forecasts appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

Annually, the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy awards the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting to a stellar investigative report that has had a direct impact on government, politics and policy at the national, state or local levels. Six reporting teams were chosen as finalists for the 2021 prize, which carries a $10,000 award for finalists and $25,000 for the winner. The Journalist’s Resource is interviewing many of the finalists and offering a behind-the-scenes look at the processes, tools and legwork it takes to create an important piece of investigative journalism. The main article discussed here, “For cops who kill, special Supreme Court protection,” was the first in a four-part Reuters investigation on a complex legal doctrine called qualified immunity, which often protects police from civil lawsuits. The Journalist’s Resource is a project of the Shorenstein Center, but was not involved in judging the Goldsmith Prize. The winner of the $25,000 will be announced on April 13.

For two years, a team of Reuters reporters built and analyzed a first-of-its kind database that showed appellate courts increasingly granting police immunity from civil rights lawsuits. The cases hinged on a legal doctrine called qualified immunity, which can shield police from those lawsuits.

But the reporters didn’t solely rely on the hard numbers, painstakingly compiled to show the consequences the legal doctrine was having on regular people’s lives — they used video, too. In fact, video doesn’t just bolster the investigation. Video helps lead the report, “For cops who kill, special Supreme Court protection,” by Andrew Chung, Lawrence Hurley, Jackie Botts, Andrea Januta and Guillermo Gomez.

The story opens:

“The U.S. high court’s continual refinement of an obscure legal doctrine has made it harder to hold police accountable when accused of using excessive force.”

Behind those words, a static image of a man standing in a hallway. Keep scrolling:

“Sick with pneumonia, agitated and confused, Johnny Leija refused to return to his hospital room.”

The static image of Leija begins to move. He’s wearing a T-shirt and pajama bottoms, walking down a corridor in a hospital in Madill, Oklahoma. A few police officers follow close behind. A nurse had called them to help give Leija an injection to calm down.

“Moments later, with three police officers pinning him on the floor, Leija was dead at age 34.”

We see three officers bring Leija down. With that, the lead — and video — end.

The Leija video and others throughout the article are unsparing. In another clip, an officer shoots Laszlo Latits dead in a car in Ferndale, Michigan, as Latits tries to back away. In yet another, officers shoot and kill Gerrit Vos as he leaves a store in Newport Beach, California. Vos was experiencing a mental health crisis.

Their deaths came after police used what federal courts found was excessive force, in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure by government authorities. A fourth video shows an officer slamming David Becker to the ground in Heber City, Utah. Becker suffered brain damage, according to Reuters. Aside from the videos, the Reuters story provides minimal detail on the Latits, Vos and Becker cases.

In those cases and hundreds others, qualified immunity protected police from lawsuits filed by individuals, or their relatives, alleging excessive force.

“Qualified immunity balances two important interests — the need to hold public officials accountable when they exercise power irresponsibly and the need to shield officials from harassment, distraction, and liability when they perform their duties reasonably,” U.S. Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority in Pearson v. Callahan, an important qualified immunity case the high court decided in 2009. The database the reporters compiled spans 529 federal appellate court opinions from 2005 to 2019, in which officers accused of excessive force raised a qualified immunity defense.

“As we were coding the cases we were looking to see if the court ruling cited any video or audio because we knew those cases would be good for a multimedia package,” says Hurley, a Reuters Supreme Court reporter.

Tip: Keep an eye out for information, such as audio and video files, that could be used in a multimedia presentation.

The reporters found appellate courts increasingly inclined to grant police immunity from civil rights lawsuits. From 2005 to 2007, those courts favored police in 44% of excessive force cases in which officers raised a qualified immunity defense. Yet from 2017 to 2019, that rate had increased to 57%. Here’s how the reporters explain the two-part test courts use to assess a qualified immunity defense:

“In part one, the court considers whether police used excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. If yes, the court moves to part two of the test. If no, qualified immunity is immediately granted. Since 2009, the Supreme Court has allowed appellate courts to skip part one. Courts have increasingly chosen this option. In part two, the court determines whether police should have known their actions violated the Constitution because court precedent clearly established their conduct as unlawful. If yes, the case goes to trial. If no, qualified immunity is granted.”

The Pearson decision allows courts to skip the first part of the test. The reporters recall laboring over the language they used to explain the doctrine. The qualified immunity explanation was “probably the most heavily edited” section of the story, says Januta, a Reuters investigative and data reporter.

“We wanted this to be a story lawyers and judges would read, but also a story people who aren’t lawyers could read and understand,” Hurley says. “I think getting that balance right was important.”

Found in a dusty box: ‘It was just luck’

Leija died in 2011 after police pinned him to the hospital floor in Madill. The officers were not criminally charged. Leija’s mother, Erma Aldaba, filed a lawsuit alleging the officers had violated her son’s Fourth Amendment rights. The officers claimed qualified immunity. The 10^th Circuit court denied that claim.

But the suit hit a terminal roadblock in November 2015 when the Supreme Court told the lower court to reconsider its ruling. The high court, in a separate qualified immunity case, had narrowly defined part two of the two-part test: “clearly established precedent.” This meant that for a qualified immunity defense to fail, the actions between officer and civilian needed to be very similar to those from some prior case in which courts found police acted unlawfully.

The lower court reversed itself. Aldaba’s suit was over. Her lawyer told Reuters that Aldaba “had to live with the fact that at every stage, every judge that reviewed the case determined that there were constitutional violations that had occurred. Despite that, she still couldn’t have a trial.”

All that remained was the video evidence. The reporters obtained some videos they used in the article from courts. The videos, a mix of security footage and police dashcams, had been submitted as evidence.

But Chung got the Leija video in a slightly different way. In 2019, Aldaba’s lawyer mailed Chung a DVD with Leija’s video, which ultimately helped carry the story’s lead. The lawyer had found the DVD in a dusty box in the storage area of his office. Chung later went to the lawyer’s office in Oklahoma and gathered hundreds of pages of documents from the box.

“It was just luck that he still had that box,” recalls Chung, a Reuters Supreme Court reporter.

Tip: Remember that the internet doesn’t contain all information, and on-the-ground reporting will always be an important source for evidence, especially as pandemic restrictions lift.

From story genesis to data analysis

The Supreme Court in April 2017 declined to hear a qualified immunity appeal from Ricardo Salazar-Limon. He had been unarmed, shot in the back by a Houston police officer, and paralyzed in October 2010.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor favored taking up the case. She observed that the high court was much more likely to take up appeals from officers denied qualified immunity protection than from plaintiffs appealing qualified immunity rulings favoring police. Justice Alito countered with a narrower view based on the ambiguous facts of the case — namely, that the court had to decline the case because details of what happened that early October morning were unclear. He further stated that the Supreme Court might take up a case if a lower court didn’t apply a legal rule or concept at all, but that the high court almost never reviews cases alleging a lower court incorrectly applied settled law.

Chung, Hurley and editor Janet Roberts, for their part, wondered if they might be able to test Sotomayor’s assertion. After months of trial and error, with a small fraction of their time to devote to the story, they settled on building a database of cases that met three criteria:

1. Plaintiffs alleged police excessive force
2. Police mounted a qualified immunity defense
3. A federal appellate court judge offered a written opinion

While the database of federal appellate court qualified immunity cases served as the main source of analysis for their story, the reporters later expanded their data to include federal district courts in Texas, where police won qualified immunity appeals at a high rate, and California, where such appeals were less successful. That database of Texas and California qualified immunity cases — 435 in total — served as the backbone for the second story in the series, “Shot by cops, thwarted by judges and geography,” by Chung, Hurley, Januta, Botts and Jaimi Dowdell.

The reporters manually reviewed nearly 1,000 opinions for their final database of 529 appellate court opinions. For the Texas and California district court database, they used manual and computer analysis to winnow roughly 2,000 cases. Not every case made it to the final databases, for a variety of reasons. Some cases mentioned qualified immunity, but didn’t hinge on a qualified immunity defense. Others centered on qualified immunity claims from civil servants other than police officers.

In their spare time, when there wasn’t pressing news to cover, the reporters would read cases and fill in a spreadsheet with rulings and whether they fit their three-part criteria. They asked key questions: Did the court decide police had committed a civil rights violation? Did the force used against a civilian fall under clearly established precedent?

“We had a hunch, we had a hypothesis, that there was something to say here, something that no one else had ever looked at, something that is extraordinarily consequential on the ground,” Chung says. “That supplied the motivation to keep doing it.”

Tip: Actively record characteristics of your data. The Reuters reporters asked dozens of questions as they read each case, in order to accurately characterize and analyze them later.

An additional analysis of qualified immunity cases the Supreme Court did and did not accept ultimately supported Sotomayor’s assertion: “Over the past 15 years, the high court took up 12 appeals of qualified immunity decisions from police, but only three from plaintiffs, even though plaintiffs asked the court to review nearly as many cases as police did,” the reporters concluded.

Januta had to learn a programming language new to her, called R, to analyze the data extracted from the court cases. She knew a different programming language, but Botts, now an income inequality reporter with CalMatters, had started the Reuters analysis using R. Januta’s takeaway from the experience: Learning a new programming language might not be as daunting as it seems at first glance.

“If you have some programming skills, don’t be intimidated by learning a new programming language,” Januta says. “Once you have the foundation the best way to learn is to have a goal and a project and a task to work on.”

She adds: “Keep your eyes and ears open for when you hear anyone in government saying, ‘Well, we just don’t know, we don’t have that data.’ That’s an opportunity for you to go out and find it and create it yourself — that’s a real way to have a public service.”

Tip: Looking for a database that doesn’t exist? Build it yourself.

Two flavors of trust building

The first story in the series — “For cops who kill, special Supreme Court protection” — opens with the moments before Leija died. It ends with the lawsuit brought by Aldaba, his mother, slipping away without the anchor of “clearly established precedent.”

While Aldaba’s lawyer was helpful in providing Chung the Leija video, the lawyer had lost touch with Aldaba herself. Chung finally tracked down Aldaba’s daughter, who worked at a bakery in a grocery store.

He called the bakery and left a message, and she called back. Chung recalls Aldaba’s daughter being reticent — but not Aldaba.

“Her mom was very eager to talk,” Chung says. “She thought it was a grave injustice that happened to her son, and she wanted the world to know about it.”

Tip: In addition to court opinions, depositions are a valuable source of detail, Hurley says. Depositions are sworn testimonies, often involving confrontational questioning of police officers and other witnesses.

Trust building with a key source took a different turn for the second story in the series, about regional disparities in qualified immunity defense outcomes, including between Texas and California. That story is carried by the journey of David Collie, shot in the back by a Fort Worth, Texas police officer in July 2016, in a case of mistaken identity.

It wasn’t easy for the reporters to persuade Collie to share his experience — after all, he had been traumatized. Collie, who was in his early-30s when the officer shot him, found himself paralyzed from the waist down, living in nursing homes since the shooting, and burdened with infections and depression.

Chung recalls roughly a dozen conversations with Collie, some late into the night, including two in-person visits before the story was published in August 2020. The goal was not to get Collie to go on the record, per se, but to reassure him that the reporters would tell his story in a fair and truthful way, with the public interest at heart.

“We wanted to makes sure we left the power in David’s hands, so that he was comfortable talking to us and trusting us,” Chung says, adding that once Collie decided he was ready to participate he “dove headlong into the project.”

Tip: Meet sources where they are, mentally and emotionally. Show potential on-the-record sources patience, empathy and honesty, particularly those who have experienced trauma.

The reporters were conscious of being fair to the police officers’ perspectives, too.

“Everyone understands police have difficult jobs,” Chung says.

During a trip to interview Aldaba, Chung stopped by the Marshall County sheriff’s office in Madill. An officer who had twice shocked Leija with a stun gun during the 2011 encounter happened to be working.

“Without any hesitation he sat down with me,” Chung says.

The officer, Steve Beebe, had regrets — he thought the encounter could have resolved differently if he and the other officers had known about Leija’s medical condition. He acknowledged that police need to be held accountable, but also said they shouldn’t be worried about being sued for doing their jobs.

“The last thing you want to do is end up with somebody dying,” the officer told Chung. Beebe, also a local Southern Baptist pastor, added he was “sad for the family. We all live in the same community.”

‘Sweat and tears’

The first story in the Reuters series was published May 8, 2020. George Floyd was killed May 25 while in Minneapolis police custody, sparking uprisings against police violence in dozens of cities and directing national media attention to the March 13 police killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky.

As Hurley points out, high-profile cases like Floyd’s and Taylor’s typically don’t get to the qualified immunity stage. Cases that attract national media attention are more likely to settle out of court.

On March 12, the city of Minneapolis agreed to pay George Floyd’s family $27 million to settle their civil lawsuit. Breonna Taylor’s family agreed to a $12 million settlement from the city of Louisville, announced September 15, 2020. Meanwhile, each year dozens of qualified immunity cases like Leija’s and Collie’s fail in court and fail to garner national coverage.

The Reuters series provided in-depth examination of a complex legal doctrine, and some of the lives affected by it, at the moment the Floyd and Taylor cases made many aware of qualified immunity for the first time. The reporters say their findings have been cited by dozens of other media outlets, in law review articles and by law professors teaching qualified immunity.

In the end, the success of the series came down to persistence.

“You do have to be committed to it,” Hurley says. “There’s a lot of sweat and tears that go into it before you come out the other side.”

Want learn more about qualified immunity? Check out our roundup of 4 data-driven analyses of thousands of qualified immunity lawsuits.

The post How they did it: Reuters reporters investigate qualified immunity in America appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

What better way to start the new year than by learning new things about how best to battle fake news and other forms of online misinformation? Below is a sampling of the research published in 2019 — seven journal articles that examine fake news from multiple angles, including what makes fact-checking most effective and the potential use of crowdsourcing to help detect false content on social media.

Because getting good news is also a great way to start 2020, I included a study that suggests President Donald Trump’s “fake news” tweets aimed at discrediting news coverage could actually help journalists. The authors of that paper recommend journalists “engage in a sort of news jujitsu, turning the negative energy of Trump’s tweets into a force for creating additional interest in news.”

This article was first published at Nieman Lab.

“Real solutions for fake news? Measuring the effectiveness of general warnings and fact-check tags in reducing belief in false stories on social media”: From Dartmouth College and the University of Michigan, published in Political Behavior. By Katherine Clayton, Spencer Blair, Jonathan A. Busam, Samuel Forstner, John Glance, Guy Green, Anna Kawata, Akhila Kovvuri, Jonathan Martin, Evan Morgan, Morgan Sandhu, Rachel Sang, Rachel Scholz‑Bright, Austin T. Welch, Andrew G. Wolff, Amanda Zhou, and Brendan Nyhan.

This study provides several new insights about the most effective ways to counter fake news on social media. Researchers found that when fake news headlines were flagged with a tag that says “Rated false,” people were less likely to accept the headline as accurate than when headlines carried a “Disputed” tag. They also found that posting a general warning telling readers to beware of misleading content could backfire. After seeing a general warning, study participants were less likely to believe true headlines and false ones.

The authors note that while their sample of 2,994 U.S. adults isn’t nationally representative, the feedback they got demonstrates that online fake news can be countered “with some degree of success.” “The findings suggest that the specific warnings were more effective because they reduced belief solely for false headlines and did not create spillover effects on perceived accuracy of true news,” they write.

“Fighting misinformation on social media using crowdsourced judgments of news source quality”: From the University of Regina and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. By Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand.

It would be time-consuming and expensive to hire crowds of professional fact-checkers to find and flag all the false content on social media. But what if the laypeople who use those platforms pitched in? Could they accurately assess the trustworthiness of news websites, even if prior research indicates they don’t do a good job judging the reliability of individual news articles? This research article, which examines the results of two related experiments with almost 2,000 participants, finds the idea has promise.

“We find remarkably high agreement between fact-checkers and laypeople,” the authors write. “This agreement is largely driven by both laypeople and fact-checkers giving very low ratings to hyper-partisan and fake news sites.”

The authors note that in order to accurately assess sites, however, people need to be familiar with them. When news sites are new or unfamiliar, they’re likely to be rated as unreliable, the authors explain. Their analysis also finds that Democrats were better at gauging the trustworthiness of media organizations than Republicans — their ratings were more similar to those of professional fact checkers. Republicans were more distrusting of mainstream news organizations.

“All the president’s tweets: Effects of exposure to Trump’s ‘fake news’ accusations on perceptions of journalists, news stories, and issue evaluation”: From Virginia Tech and EAB, published in Mass Communication and Society. By Daniel J. Tamul, Adrienne Holz Ivory, Jessica Hotter, and Jordan Wolf.

When Trump turns to Twitter to accuse legitimate news outlets of being “fake news,” does the public’s view of journalists change? Are people who read his tweets less likely to believe news coverage? To investigate such questions, researchers conducted two studies, during which they showed some participants a sampling of the president’s “fake news” tweets and asked them to read a news story.

Here’s what the researchers learned: The more tweets people chose to read, the greater their intent to read more news in the future. As participants read more tweets, their assessments of news stories’ and journalists’ credibility also rose. “If anything, we can conclude that Trump’s tweets about fake news drive greater interest in news more generally,” the authors write.

The authors’ findings, however, cannot be generalized beyond the individuals who participated in the two studies — 331 people for the first study and then 1,588 for the second, more than half of whom were undergraduate students.

Based on their findings, the researchers offer a few suggestions for journalists. “In the short term,” they write, “if journalists can push out stories to social media feeds immediately after Trump or others tweet about legitimate news as being ‘fake news,’ then practitioners may disarm Trump’s toxic rhetoric and even enhance the perceived credibility of and demand for their own work. Using hashtags, quickly posting stories in response to Trump, and replying directly to him may also tether news accounts to the tweets in social media feeds.”

“Who shared it?: Deciding what news to trust on social media”: From NORC at the University of Chicago and the American Press Institute, published in Digital Journalism. By David Sterrett, Dan Malato, Jennifer Benz, Liz Kantor, Trevor Tompson, Tom Rosenstiel, Jeff Sonderman, and Kevin Loker.

This study looks at whether news outlets or public figures have a greater influence on people’s perception of a news article’s trustworthiness. The findings suggest that when a public figure such as Oprah Winfrey or Dr. Oz shares a news article on social media, people’s attitude toward the article is linked to how much they trust the public figure. A news outlet’s reputation appears to have far less impact.

In fact, researchers found mixed evidence that audiences will be more likely to trust and engage with news if it comes from a reputable news outlet than if it comes from a fake news website. The authors write that “if people do not know a [news outlet] source, they approach its information similarly to how they would a [news outlet] source they know and trust.”

The authors note that the conditions under which they conducted the study were somewhat different from those that participants would likely encounter in real life. Researchers asked a nationally representative sample of 1,489 adults to read and answer questions about a simulated Facebook post that focused on a news article, which appeared to have been shared by one of eight public figures. In real life, these adults might have responded differently had they spotted such a post on their personal Facebook feeds, the authors explain.

Still, the findings provide new insights on how people interpret and engage with news. “For news organizations who often rely on the strength of their brands to maintain trust in their audience, this study suggests that how people perceive their reporting on social media may have little to do with that brand,” the authors write. “A greater presence or role for individual journalists on social networks may help them boost trust in the content they create and share.”

“Trends in the diffusion of misinformation on social media”: From New York University and Stanford University, published in Research and Politics. By Hunt Allcott, Matthew Gentzkow, and Chuan Yu.

This paper looks at changes in the volume of misinformation circulating on social media. The gist: Since 2016, interactions with false content on Facebook have dropped dramatically but have risen on Twitter. Still, lots of people continue to click on, comment on, like and share misinformation.

The researchers looked at how often the public interacted with stories from 569 fake news websites that appeared on Facebook and Twitter between January 2015 and July 2018. They found that Facebook engagements fell from about 160 million a month in late 2016 to about 60 million a month in mid-2018. On Twitter, material from fake news sites was shared about 4 million times a month in late 2016 and grew to about 5 million shares a month in mid-2018.

The authors write that the evidence is “consistent with the view that the overall magnitude of the misinformation problem may have declined, possibly due to changes to the Facebook platform following the 2016 election.”

“Lazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning”: From Yale University, published in Cognition. By Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand.

This study looks at the cognitive mechanisms behind belief in fake news by investigating whether fake news has gained traction because of political partisanship or because some people lack strong reasoning skills. A key finding: Adults who performed better on a cognitive test were better able to detect fake news, regardless of their political affiliation or education levels and whether the headlines they read were pro-Democrat, pro-Republican or politically neutral. Across two studies conducted with 3,446 participants, the evidence suggests that “susceptibility to fake news is driven more by lazy thinking than it is by partisan bias per se,” the authors write.

The authors also discovered that study participants who supported Trump had a weaker capacity for differentiating between real and fake news than did those who supported 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The authors write that they are not sure why that is, but it might explain why fake news that benefited Republicans or harmed Democrats seemed more common before the 2016 national election.

“Fact-checking: A meta-analysis of what works and for whom”: From Northwestern University, University of Haifa, and Temple University, published in Political Communication. By Nathan Walter, Jonathan Cohen, R. Lance Holbert, and Yasmin Morag.

Even as the number of fact-checking outlets continues to grow globally, individual studies of their impact on misinformation have provided contradictory results. To better understand whether fact-checking is an effective means of correcting political misinformation, scholars from three universities teamed up to synthesize the findings of 30 studies published or released between 2013 and 2018. Their analysis reveals that the success of fact-checking efforts varies according to a number of factors.

The resulting paper offers numerous insights on when and how fact-checking succeeds or fails. Some of the big takeaways:

• Fact-checking messages that feature graphical elements such as so-called “truth scales” tended to be less effective in correcting misinformation than those that did not. The authors point out that “the inclusion of graphical elements appears to backfire and attenuate correction of misinformation.”
• Fact-checkers were more effective when they tried to correct an entire statement rather than parts of one. Also, according to the analysis, “fact-checking effects were significantly weaker for campaign-related statements.”
• Fact-checking that refutes ideas that contradict someone’s personal ideology was more effective than fact-checking aimed at debunking ideas that match someone’s personal ideology.
• Simple messages were more effective. “As a whole, lexical complexity appears to detract from fact-checking efforts,” the authors explain.

Interested in research on fake news and digital media from previous years? Please check out our research roundups from 2018 and 2017.

This image was obtained from the Flickr account of Alan Levine and is being used under a Creative Commons license. No changes were made.

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Efforts to shape public perceptions of a given issue — also known as agenda-setting — are a mainstay of the tobacco industry, researchers show. Robert Proctor, a professor of the history of science at Stanford University, details the tactics industry executives deployed over more than a century to promote their products and cast doubt on the science documenting tobacco-related health risks in his 2011 book Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition.

“What kinds of strategies are used to manufacture doubt?” Proctor writes in the book. A few tactics used: “Hire journalists to write industry-sympathetic articles in the popular press and pressure media organs to ignore or suppress reports unfavorable to the industry. Threaten to withhold advertising from magazines that give too much attention to tobacco-disease links.” Other strategies: Divert. Distract. Deny.

“People tend to include or exclude from their cognitions what the media include or exclude from their content,” writes media scholar Donald L. Shaw in an influential 1979 paper on agenda-setting in mass communication. “People also tend to assign an importance to what they [the news media] include that closely resembles the emphasis given to events, issues and persons from the mass media.” Accordingly, the tobacco industry’s influence on the media in turn shapes public perceptions of the issues.

One example of agenda-setting that plays out through the media is found in its coverage of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. Tobacco industry CSR initiatives are projects — philanthropic or otherwise — undertaken “to shape public and policymaker understandings about tobacco control and the industry,” according to the authors of a 2018 study on the topic.

The study looks at 649 U.S. news reports about tobacco industry CSR initiatives published in newspapers, online and in television and radio broadcasts between 1998 and 2014. The news coverage was predominately positive, and rarely quoted tobacco control advocates, researchers found.

To what extent does news coverage still reflect tobacco industry efforts to agenda-set? How has the introduction of e-cigarettes complicated the issue? How has agenda-setting influenced public perceptions of tobacco control and, more recently, vaping?

This research roundup aims to answer those questions by examining studies published in the past five years on media coverage of tobacco and e-cigarettes. We hope to help journalists understand some of the forces that might shape their coverage as well as raise awareness about how the nature and tone of news stories have affected public perception and public policy.

Vaping in the news

Content Analysis of US News Stories About E-Cigarettes in 2015
Wackowski, Olivia A.; et al. Nicotine & Tobacco Research, August 2018.

This paper analyzes news coverage of e-cigarettes provided in 2015 by a variety of U.S. news organizations — four newswires, four online news outlets and the 30 newspapers with the largest circulations. In total, the researchers analyzed 295 articles. They found that 45.1% of stories focused on policy or regulatory issues around vaping. The next most common topics were health effects (appearing in 21.7% of studied articles) and e-cigarette prevalence (featured in 21% of articles). Articles frequently mentioned the following concerns: youth e-cigarette use (45.4%), e-cigarettes as a potential gateway to smoking (33.9%) and the appeal of flavors (22.9%). Articles that focused on Food and Drug Administration regulation of e-cigarettes more frequently mentioned youth prevalence of vaping (61%) than adult prevalence (13.5%).

“News articles more frequently discussed potential e-cigarette risks or concerns (80%) than benefits (45.4%), such as smoking harm-reduction,” the authors write. Similarly, when expert sources such as doctors, researchers and government officials were quoted, they were more likely to cite risks associated with e-cigarettes than benefits, such as avoiding the tar in traditional cigarettes. The researchers conclude, “While such coverage may inform the public about potential e-cigarette risks, they may also contribute to increasing perceptions that e-cigarettes are as harmful as tobacco cigarettes.” 

Youth and Young Adult Exposure to and Perceptions of News Media Coverage about E-Cigarettes in the United States, Canada and England
Wackowski, Olivia A.; Sontag, Jennah M.; Hammond, David. Preventive Medicine, April 2019.

This study analyzes what teens think about e-cigarettes. It looks at online survey data collected from 12,064 teenagers ages 16 to 19 in the U.S., Canada and England. The survey was conducted in July and August of 2017. It asked respondents about their exposure to news about e-cigarettes and their beliefs about the content of these stories. Respondents also answered questions about their perceptions of the harmfulness of e-cigarettes and their intention to use or stop using them. Nearly one-fifth, or 17.1% of respondents, reported encountering e-cigarette news at least “sometimes” over the past month. Most respondents thought the content was either mostly negative (35.7%) or mixed (34.8%). Only 19% viewed the coverage as mostly positive. White respondents were more likely to see negative e-cigarette news than their non-white peers.

“Participants exposed to mostly negative e-cigarette news were more likely to perceive that e-cigarettes cause at least some harm and, among past 30 day users, have intentions to quit e-cigarettes in the next month,” the authors write. Teens who reported seeing mostly positive news were more likely to report curiosity about trying e-cigarettes than peers who encountered mixed or mostly negative coverage. “E-cigarette news exposure may shape e-cigarette harm perceptions and use intentions, as well as reflect existing beliefs and product interest,” the authors conclude. 

To Vape or Not to Vape? Effects of Exposure to Conflicting News Headlines on Beliefs about Harms and Benefits of Electronic Cigarette Use: Results from a Randomized Controlled Experiment
Tan, Andy S. L.; et al. Preventive Medicine, December 2017.

This randomized, controlled experiment provides a complementary perspective to the more common observational research on the topic of news coverage of tobacco products. In this study, 2,056 U.S. adults between the ages of 18 and 85 responded to an online survey after viewing headlines about the safety of e-cigarettes. Each was assigned to one of four groups, reading headlines reflecting one of four of the following messages about the safety e-cigarettes: positive, negative, conflicting, or no message. Participants focused solely on the headlines and then answered questions about their beliefs about the harms and benefits of using e-cigarettes. The researchers found that participants who read negative headlines reported increased beliefs about harms and decreased beliefs of benefits, compared with participants who viewed positive headlines. These differences held when the researchers further analyzed the responses of only participants who had never used e-cigarettes. Adults who had never used e-cigarettes and read headlines with conflicting messages about e-cigarettes reported lower belief in the benefits of e-cigarettes than those who viewed positive headlines. The researchers suggest these findings demonstrate the link between the tone of news coverage of e-cigarettes and public beliefs about the product.

Tobacco control and industry in the news

A Multi-Year Study of Tobacco Control in Newspaper Editorials Using Community Characteristic Data and Content Analysis Findings
Stanfield, Kellie; Rodgers, Shelly. Health Communication, July 2018.

This study looks at the content of 1,473 editorials published in all Missouri newspapers between 2005 and 2011. Researchers chose Missouri because it has one of the lowest tobacco excise taxes in the country and does not have a statewide indoor smoking ban. At the community level, however, there have been successful initiatives to adopt smoke-free policies, the authors explain.

The researchers found that most editorials were about tobacco restrictions or ordinances, used neutral language and were factual in nature. However, they discovered that most of the editorials that took a position against tobacco control were published in cities with no clean air ordinances and the highest rates of smoking. On the other hand, cities that had low smoking rates and smoke-free policies had the highest percentage of editorials with a positive slant toward tobacco control. “The results show an agenda-setting function at the editorial level and a potential selection bias in selecting editorials according to topic, slant, and tone,” the authors conclude. “Not only were positive tones nearly non-existent in editorials, the majority of negatively slanted editorials were published in cities with the highest rates of smoking and no ordinance.”

Characteristics of Community Newspaper Coverage of Tobacco Control and Its Relationship to the Passage of Tobacco Ordinances
Eckler, Petya; Rodgers, Shelly; Everett, Kevin. Journal of Community Health, October 2016.

This study also looks at Missouri newspaper coverage of tobacco issues, but focuses on articles and editorials. The researchers looked at content published by all 381 Missouri newspapers between September 2006 and November 2011. In total, they analyzed 4,711 tobacco news stories. The researchers found that most were about tobacco control and were positively slanted toward it. “Stories with a positive tobacco control slant had information about enforcement, emphasized the lack of negative economic consequences or the health and economic benefits of policies or worker protection,” the authors write. However, editorials tended to be more negative in tone — in both the headline and text — than news stories.

Newspapers in towns that had smoke-free ordinances ran more stories about tobacco control than those located in towns without smoke-free ordinances. The authors write that this implies a connection between media coverage of tobacco control and the passage of tobacco control policies. Towns without smoke-free ordinances had more “non-tobacco control stories,” including news stories about youth smoking.

“We conclude that the tobacco industry may have had success in impacting news stories in no-ordinance cities by diverting attention from tobacco control to secondary topics, such as youth smoking, which meant stories had fewer public health facts and fewer positive health benefits in towns that may have needed these details most,” the authors write.

Setting the Agenda for a Healthy Retail Environment: Content Analysis of US Newspaper Coverage of Tobacco Control Policies Affecting the Point of Sale, 2007–2014
Myers, Allison E.; et al. Tobacco Control, July 2017.

This study looks at media coverage of point-of-sale tobacco control policies — interventions targeted at the place where people purchase tobacco products. Some examples are requirements for tobacco retailers to acquire licenses, prohibitions on the redemption of coupons for tobacco purchases and restrictions on the sale of tobacco in pharmacies.

This study looked at 917 news articles on point-of-sale tobacco control policies published in 268 regional newspapers and five national newspapers between 2007 and 2014. Nearly half of these articles focused on tobacco retailer licensing. Just over half had a mixed, neutral or anti-tobacco control slant. Articles that were framed in terms of politics, rights, or regulation, or that quoted anti-tobacco control sources (e.g., tobacco industry sources, tobacco retailers or tobacco users) were much less likely to have a pro-tobacco-control slant.

Tobacco retailers were cited in 39.6% of the stories studied, second only to government sources (52.3%) and followed by tobacco industry sources (22.0%). On the other hand, stories that focused on health issues and featured research and sources in favor of tobacco control tended to support tobacco control.

Trends in US Newspaper and Television Coverage of Tobacco
Nelson, David E.; et al. Tobacco Control, January 2015.

This study looks at newspaper, newswire and television coverage of tobacco issues in the U.S. between 2004 and 2010. The researchers looked at data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Office on Smoking and Health’s news media surveillance system. The CDC created this system in 2004 to track tobacco stories in the news. The system identifies tobacco news stories in 10 major newspapers, two major newswires and six national television networks. They found that, on average, there were three newspaper stories, four newswire stories and one television story on tobacco each day. Television stories tended to focus on addiction or health effects and were less likely to focus on secondhand smoke or tobacco regulation than newspaper and newswire stories. Newspaper and newswire coverage of tobacco issues varied more than television coverage. “Newspaper editors and television producers have an important agenda-setting role, serving as gatekeepers who make decisions about whether a topic or event is ‘newsworthy,’ and thus, reported at all,” the authors write. “Differences in tobacco themes among individual newspapers and newswire services also strongly suggest that news editors differ in whether and how they choose to report tobacco stories.”

US Media Coverage of Tobacco Industry Corporate Social Responsibility Initiatives
McDaniel, Patricia A.; Lown, E. Anne; Malone, Ruth E. Journal of Community Health, February 2018.

The tobacco industry’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives are projects meant “to shape public and policymaker understandings about tobacco control and the industry.” They include food aid, arts funding, youth smoking prevention programs, disaster relief, employee volunteer programs and research efforts.

This study looks at 649 U.S. news reports about tobacco industry CSR initiatives — including newspaper articles, online news stories and transcripts of television broadcasts and NPR broadcasts — available through online media databases. Publication dates ranged from 1998 through 2014. Tobacco industry CSR coverage was predominately positive, and rarely quoted tobacco control advocates. Local newspapers provided most of the coverage of tobacco industry CSR.

The most common initiatives featured were unrelated to tobacco and aided “non-controversial” beneficiaries such as students, the elderly and arts organizations. Positive coverage was more common in the South — where many tobacco companies are headquartered — than in the West. When tobacco control advocates were quoted, news coverage was less likely to have a positive slant.

“The absence of tobacco control advocates from media coverage represents a missed opportunity to influence opinion regarding the negative public health implications of tobacco industry CSR,” the authors conclude. “Countering the media narrative of virtuous companies doing good deeds could be particularly beneficial in the South, where the burdens of tobacco-caused disease are greatest, and coverage of tobacco companies more positive.”

Read more: Teen vaping: Is it really a gateway to cigarette smoking?; ‘Causes’ vs. ‘contributes to’: Strong causal language on product warning labels more effective; E-cigarettes aren’t better at helping smokers quit than other strategies

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Media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan has written often about the challenges and shortcomings of media technologies, generally criticizing the growing power of media giants Google and Facebook. In his new book, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy, he details problems with how Facebook works, arguing that “no company has contributed more to the global collapse of basic tenets of deliberation and democracy.”

In the book, Vaidhyanathan, a former journalist who now directs the University of Virginia’s Center for Media and Citizenship, examines Facebook’s impact on newsrooms, many of which have integrated the social media platform into virtually every step of the news reporting process.

Recently, Vaidhyanathan came to speak at Harvard Kennedy School as part of an event series hosted by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, of which Journalist’s Resource is a project. His visit gave JR an opportunity to ask him more about how Facebook has changed journalism.

Below is an excerpt from that conversation — six of our questions and Vaidhyanathan’s answers, which also offer insights on how reporters can do a better job covering Facebook and its influence on the lives of billions of people worldwide.

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In your book, you talk about the importance of Facebook to newsrooms. And I’ve heard you say that no decision is made in newsrooms without the specter of Facebook. Can you elaborate on that and why that is or isn’t a good thing?

“Journalists want to be read or viewed. You can’t be read or viewed if your content disappears from Facebook. It is a core outlet for news distribution. Editors and designers are constantly making decisions based on what works on Facebook, so they choose images and write headlines to pander to Facebook’s algorithms and the behavior of Facebook users. It’s largely a bad thing because journalism is feeding the beast that’s starving it — the more that journalists pander to Facebook … the more that Facebook becomes the governing mechanism to journalism. At the same time, Facebook is drawing advertisers away from journalism. Facebook gets all the money and journalistic outlets create more content for Facebook and sometimes pay Facebook to promote it. It’s all absurd.”

What should journalists be mindful of when thinking about how Facebook impacts the way they do their jobs or the way they cover an issue or event? 

“Even when reporters have the best possible news judgment as their primary motivator, they can’t help but be affected by the draw of click-bait: the sense that some stories, some words and some images are going to attract more attention on Facebook. And they’re quickly told by editors how well their articles or videos moved around Facebook. In many newsrooms, there is a scoreboard posted in the middle of the newsroom with the social media impacts of certain stories … You can’t help but be obsessed by [the editorial analytics platforms] Chartbeat or Parse.ly — those are the big ones.

“Facebook forces journalists to be more sensational, because the key to winning the Facebook game is to create conversations about a piece — and that usually means an argument.”

What are the main ideas — or warnings even — that you’d like newsrooms and journalists to take away from your book?

“This is going to be a losing battle for a long time, but that means journalists should turn their attention to the advertising industry. The advertising industry has been very destructive to journalism recently, and journalists should explore other means and models. The Texas Tribune, for instance, depends on philanthropy and foundations to do its work so it’s liberated from the advertising beast. Not everybody can do that. But as things are going, advertising-based news outlets might number in the single digits within a decade because all their money went to Facebook and Google. The other thing I would say is, beware if your news organization is complicit in the surveillance and ad targeting that Facebook and Google are engaged in. That might seem like the only way to compete, but it’s deeply unethical.”

Academic research, including a study from Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, indicates “fake news” played a limited role in national elections in 2016. But there’s still a lot of commentary and coverage of that issue in the media. There’s a lot of focus on how fake news was shared and distributed via social media sites such as Facebook. Can you speak to whether this ongoing conversation about Facebook and fake news is still important?

“Defining the problem as fake news is inadequate and distracting. The problem is garbage of all sorts — fake news, half-fake news, exaggerated claims, conspiracy theories, hate speech, extremist propaganda, harassment, all of which creates cacophony — constant screaming. The problem is not that some people might believe something that’s not true. The problem is that most people might stop caring if anything is true. The other thing is that if a study showed fake news had a small effect on the 2016 election, we have to remember all it took was a small effect. [President Donald] Trump won by 80,000 votes in three states. Small effects matter.”

A lot of national news organizations cover Facebook as a company and issues surrounding Facebook as a national story. But it doesn’t seem to be a focus for local newspapers and other local publications. Should Facebook be covered from a local angle and, if so, how?

“Local news organizations should pay attention to what happens on community Facebook pages. That can give them early warning to issues that matter to people and uprisings or demonstrations or protests that might be in the works. The fact that people work out their politics on Facebook these days makes it imperative that journalists understand how Facebook works in their lives.

“In terms of the larger effects of Facebook on the world, one of the reasons we spend so much time on it and do so much political and social work on it is that we have let our local institutions erode. Local journalists should pay a lot of attention to the parts of the community that enhance conversations and foster deliberation. Every library budget cut drives people to Facebook.”

Do you have any other suggestions for things journalists should be doing differently in terms of how they cover Facebook as a company and Facebook as a social media platform?

“There has been so much great journalism about Facebook and Google in the last two years, but it was all about five years too late. Journalists would not have been surprised by [the] Cambridge Analytica [data-sharing scandal] or the role of Facebook in political propaganda if they had been paying attention to social media scholars. We have been warning about these problems for nearly a decade.”

Looking for research on journalism and Facebook? Check out Journalist’s Resource’s write-up on how Facebook has become a substitute for other news sources. We spotlight several studies on digital and social media in this research roundup.

What research says about how bad information spreads online

How to tell good research from flawed research: 13 questions journalists should ask

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Televised local news broadcasts focus more on national politics and slant more to the right at present than in recent years, new research finds. These changes, the paper concludes, are not in response to changing viewer tastes, rather, they stem from the ownership of the media outlets themselves.

As local print news media outlets wither, local television news remains one of the few sources of community and state-level coverage. But even this domain is under threat, according to two researchers from Emory University who uncovered the drivers of what they label “the long-term decline in local coverage.”

The scholars analyzed local TV news broadcasts to measure shifts in topics covered and ideological slant. They looked at 743 local news stations over the last two-thirds of 2017, a period that coincides with the purchase of 14 new stations by a conservative-leaning conglomerate owner, the Sinclair Media Group. In all, the group owns 193 stations in 89 Designated Market Areas.

The researchers compared 7.5 million transcript segments to compare changes in coverage between Sinclair-acquired stations and other stations operating in these markets. They found:

• Comparing Sinclair-owned with non-Sinclair stations, the former spent more time on national versus local politics. An average station in the sample weighted their local politics coverage at about 12.6 percentage points; Sinclair stations gave about 4 percentage points less weight to local politics than other stations.
• On the other hand, national politics coverage at Sinclair-owned stations increased. After acquisition by the conglomerate, these stations saw a 25 percent increase compared to the average level of national politics coverage.
• Coverage of national politics saw a rightward shift at Sinclair stations. The “slant scores,” based on repetition of ideologically-linked phrases, increased by about one standard deviation after acquisition by Sinclair as compared to other stations in the same markets.
• The authors conclude that content changes are thus supply- rather than demand-driven. To further support this point, they analyze viewer response to changes in ownership. They find a slight decrease in viewership, though the figure is not statistically significant.
• Looking at specific markets with above-median and below-median vote share for Trump, the researchers found significant drops in viewership for Sinclair-acquired stations in Democratic-leaning areas and slight increases in Republican-leaning areas.
• These viewership changes cost Sinclair ratings, but the authors indicate that consolidating coverage to focus more on national news still might benefit the conglomerate because of production cost savings.
• The authors suggest that changes in local TV news coverage might affect future elections. For right-leaning viewers, it amplifies the media’s already documented echo-chamber effect, increasing political polarization. Further, because Sinclair acquisitions did not produce significant viewer response effects, the ideological shift might have insidious effects on other viewers. “The vast majority of viewers watching before the acquisition date continued to watch afterwards, despite the substantial changes in political content,” they write. “For these non-switching viewers, the ideological valence of their news diet lurched rightwards following the acquisition.”
• The scholars also worry that substituting national for local coverage might have detrimental effects on the ability of the populace to hold local governments accountable.

Photo by Evert F. Baumgardner used under a Creative Commons license.

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