No abstract

One of most negative campaigns in history may have taken place during the 2014 Senate election cycle. Nearly 75% of senate ads aired during a two-week period in early fall of 2014 showed a candidate in a negative light, according to the Wesleyan Media Project. A postelection analysis by the Center for Public Integrity showed that 46% of the more than one million ads aired during the 2014 senate campaigns were negative. And, in the most competitive states, the proportion of negative ads was even higher (e.g., 67% in North Carolina, 58% in Kansas). Negative advertisements sponsored by candidates, interest groups, and political parties are being launched on the airways, in newspapers, on radio, and via the Internet at an unprecedented pace. These advertisements, however, are now routinely subjected to fact checking.The Washington Post, along with many other fact-checking organizations, such as PolitiFact, The AP Factcheck, and Factcheck.org, examine thousands of statements and political advertisements during campaigns to determine the accuracy of the claims. For instance, during the 2012 election cycle, PolitiFact had 36 reporters and editors working in 11 states producing more than 800 fact checks on the presidential campaign and hundreds more for candidates running for the U.S. House and U.S. Senate.

The chapter authors develop an online survey experiment to examine how corrective news can influence people’s views about Muslims and Syrian refugees during the 2016 presidential campaign. The survey experiment varies the ideological source of the news (i.e., FOX News, MSNBC, Reuters), while keeping the news content identical across conditions. The survey experiment found that people who read positive information about Muslims in an article attributed to FOX News learn significantly less from the news article, compared to people who read the same story attributed to MSNBC or Reuters. People assigned to the FOX News article become less positive in their views of Muslims, Syrian refugees, and Syrian refugee policy compared to people reading the same article attributed to MSNBC and Reuters. The authors argue that the disfluency experienced by readers of a FOX News article presenting positive news about Muslims led people in the FOX News condition to develop less positive views of Muslims and Muslim-related policies. The study suggests that the news media can help mediate the impact of anti-Muslim rhetoric from politicians by presenting corrective facts. The influence of the news, however, depends on the source. Understanding the potential power and limits of corrective news is critical in today’s highly polarized media environment.