To Label or Not To Label? Hostile Perceptions of Fact-Checks and Their Sources in the United States
Abstract
In this paper, we seek to understand how news audiences respond when a story: 1) is labelled as a fact-check, 2) engages in a fact-check that does or does not rate the claim, and 3) is factchecked by well-known ideological sources of news. We investigate these questions via a survey experiment of a population-based sample of adults in the United States. Our work is conceptually similar to studies where perceived bias is measured after a news story is purposefully altered by researchers to favor one side. For example, audiences accurately recognize bias in stories that genuinely slant toward one side (Kim, 2015; Gunther, Christen, Liebhart, Chia, 2001; Brewer, Young, & Jones, 2013), or, similarly, originate from friendly or unfriendly sources (Arpan & Raney, 2003; Reid, 2012). Fact-checks are a different animal. That is, we differ from prior research in that, in our survey experiment, the vessel itself is slanted even though it is balanced. Discovering how Americans react to this new form of accountability journalism will not only help us understand how the public reacts to specific factchecking content but could also assist news organizations in deciding whether they should label their fact-checks as a unique type of journalism or simply report them without the fact-check moniker.