The Reception of Fake News: The Interpretations and Practices That Shape the Consumption of Perceived Misinformation
By María Celeste Wagner, Pablo Boczkowski. Digital Journalism, 2019
146 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract How do people make sense of, and deal with, a changing media landscape perceived to be filled with misinformation and fake news? To answer this, we draw upon data from seventy-one in-depth interviews in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Miami. We found that perceptions about the overall media ecosystem were characterized by a: a) negative view of the current quality of news reporting, b) particular distrust of news circulation on social media; and c) concern about the effects of these trends mainly on the information habits of others. To counter these perceptions, participants indicated to rely on: a) traditional fact-based media, accompanied by a rejection of opinionated outlets; b) personal experience and knowledge; c) repetition of information across outlets; d) consumption of cross-ideological sources; e) fact-checking; and f) trust in certain personal contacts on social media, who are perceived as assessors of news quality. Our findings suggest that: a) news consumption is being ritualized in new and more personalized ways; b) social media is seen as a gateway to news partly because audiences find opinion leaders in terms of their skills as credibility assessors; and c) journalism could cater more to audiences’ demands for more fact-oriented and less discussion-based content.
Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ae6b2d5261c7177251d8afa5bd327b47c98979ab
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In Communication
In Sociology and Political Science
Citations in the corpus
- Partisan Polarization Is the Primary Psychological Motivation behind Political Fake News Sharing on Twitter (2020, background): “But researchers have largely failed to conduct adequate tests ofwhy ordinary citizens take part in the distribution of fake news (Wagner and Boczkowski 2019).”