Complete Story
07/18/2018
Readers may trust news stories more when they don’t know their source
Readers’ trust in news stories depends more on the source’s alignment with their political preferences than the actual content of the story, according to a new report from the Knight Foundation and Gallup.
Source attribution can reduce readers’ trust by reminding them of their personal preferences and biases, the study suggests.
The study assigned 3,432 Americans to one of four groups, where they viewed news articles on an aggregation website that included the article’s news source, the accompanying image, both source and image, or neither. In the display below, articles are shown with the news source but no image.
