In the current media landscape, it is becoming increasingly difficult for citizens to rely on trustworthy information, not least because reliable facts are mixed with dubious claims, unsubstantiated opinions, or outright lies. The ability to distinguish factual from other types of mediated information is becoming increasingly crucial, but we know little about how well-equipped citizens are to make these distinctions. In an original survey study conducted in ten European countries, we asked respondents whether they considered six different statements relating to (...) the European Union to be factual or opinion statements. Our results show that citizens have considerable difficulties in correctly identifying both factual information and opinions. Next to pre-existing judgements, we identify media-related, political, and sociodemographic factors that influence categorisation accuracy. We discuss our findings in relation to citizens’ perceptions of journalistic credibility and their information literacy as well as ongoing debates about the effectiveness of fact-checkers on social media. (shrink)

The present study investigates whether or not reading about corrupt politicians influences peoples’ subsequent judgments toward political actors’ supposed corruptness. We expected this media stereotype priming effect to be dependent on pre-existing implicit stereotypes. It was hypothesized that only those participants would show a media priming effect who already have a strong automatic association between ‘politicians’ and ‘corrupt’ in memory prior to reading a further facilitative article. Conversely, people who do not have a comparable biased cognitive association should not. Data (...) from an experiment support this hypothesis: We found pre-existing implicit stereotypes to moderate the media priming effect on explicit stereotypes, but only when the newspaper article covered the “corrupt politician” media stereotype with sufficient salience. Furthermore, the experiment showed that antagonistic media primes did not produce a media priming effect at all. Antagonistic articles were simply not able to prime corruption-related memory traces. (shrink)

We test the role of like-minded and cross-cutting political discussion as a facilitator of online and offline political participation and examine the role of strong versus weak network ties. Most prior research on the topic has employed cross-sectional designs that may lead to spurious relationships due to the lack of controlled variables. The findings of a two-wave panel survey controlling the autoregressive effects suggest that cross-cutting talk with weak ties significantly dampens online but not offline political participation. However, no such (...) effects were detectable for cross-cutting talk with strong ties. In addition, we found no effect of discussions involving like-minded individuals in either weak or strong network connections on online and offline forms of political engagement. Implications are discussed. (shrink)