Polls show a strong decline in public trust of traditional news outlets

This paper argues that in all areas of communication theory, we should give greater consideration to the possibility of expression affecting the expresser. A general model of the effects of messages on both senders and receivers is introduced, organizing and resolving contradictions in past research by distinguishing between effects of the expectation of expression, effects of message composition, and effects of a message being released to others. When applied to deliberation, the model results in several experimentally testable explanations of causal mechanisms involved in deliberation's predicted effects, a stronger basis for the distinction between deliberative and argumentative discussion, and several tentative practical recommendations for encouraging open-mindedness in deliberation.When both scholars and laypeople attempt to explain communication, they most often do so using a reception-effects paradigm in which all effects of communication are assumed to result from message reception. Communication is thought of in terms of several related metaphors, such as information flow and information transmission (Krippendorff, 1993), all of which imply that preexisting information travels in some form from one actor to another and then has its effects, if any, on arrival. This paradigm guides our thinking away from several possibilities, including that the act of expression might change the message sender, that expressed ideas often do not exist intact, if at all, in the sender's mind prior to expression, and that attention toand thus effects of-received messages may result from the expectation of being able to respond. This paper offers a general model of the effects of both sending and receiving messages, organizes the disconnected but substantial empirical evidence for its expression-effects propositions, and illustrates the model's utility by using it to generate alternative explanations of some of the predicted effects of deliberation.

This experiment tests effects of passive, neutral reporting of contradictory factual claims on audiences. Exposure to such reporting is found to affect a new self-efficacy construct developed in this study called epistemic political efficacy (EPE), which taps confidence in one's own ability to determine truth in politics. Measurement of EPE is found to be reliable and valid, and effects of neutral reporting on it are found to be conditional on prior interest in the issues under dispute. Implications of this effect and of EPE are discussed. Self-efficacy theory (Bandura, 1982) suggests these short-term effects may accumulate over time. EPE may affect outcomes related to political understanding, opinion formation, and information seeking.

This study differentiates two explanations of agenda‐setting effects: agenda cueing (the influence of the mere fact of news coverage) and agenda reasoning (the influence of reasons for problem importance in the content of news stories). We isolate the two using a report summarizing recent news coverage as the experimental stimulus, instead of actual news coverage, allowing independent manipulation of agenda cue exposure and agenda reason exposure. A key moderator in both processes is gatekeeping trust, or trust in the media to base coverage decisions on problem importance judgments. Specifically, pure cues (without agenda reasons) are more influential on those with higher gatekeeping trust, and among those with low gatekeeping trust, cues are more influential when backed by agenda reasons.

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