Highlighting Incivility: How the News Media’s Focus on Political Incivility Affects Political Trust and News Credibility

Abstract

Previous research showed that political trust declines when politicians debate in uncivil ways. This article extends this research by analyzing how the news media’s tendency to focus on and even overstate incivility in post-debate coverage affects political trust and the news media’s own credibility. The results of two preregistered survey experiments show that politicians’ use of incivility decreases their perceived trustworthiness. The effects of incivility-focused news coverage on politicians’ perceived trustworthiness are more mixed with one experiment revealing a negative effect and one revealing no significant effect. Both experiments furthermore show that incivility-focused coverage decreases the news media’s own credibility.

How Intense Language Hurts a Politician's Trustworthiness: Voter Norms of a Political Debate via Language Expectancy Theory

“…The camera filming, set lighting, microphone audio, and video editing were overseen by a professional videographer. In line with similar research (e.g., Brooks & Geer, 2007;Goovaerts, 2023;Mutz, 2015), there were not partisan cues biasing the results. Debate audiences tend to "almost always" agree with what their own candidate says (Hopmann et al, 2018, p. 288), thus we did not assign party labels nor feature candidates familiar to participants.…”

“…Goovaerts & Turkenburg, 2023). Furthermore, media coverage emphasize and even exaggerate the extent to which politicians are uncivil in debates (Goovaerts, 2023). Moreover, the transforming media landscape in recent years has given the impression that debates are full of incivility and such trends are heightening (Goovaerts, 2023).…”

“…Brooks and Geer (2007) first speculated that “uncivil attacks could make people feel that they are vulnerable to untrustworthy tendencies among candidates” (p. 10). Goovaerts (2023; Goovaerts & Marien, 2020) was the first to test this empirical position that incivility would make a specific politician seem untrustworthy (relative to the corpus of research which tested effects on politicians in general).…”

“…Voters say that they dislike incivility and desire politicians behave with civility toward each other. Incivility causes voters to distrust the government (Mutz & Reeves, 2005) and to distrust politicians (Goovaerts, 2023). However, voters find incivility far more entertaining and enjoyable than civil language (Mutz, 2015).…”

How Contextual Features Shape Incivility Over Time: An Analysis of the Evolution and Determinants of Political Incivility in Televised Election Debates (1985–2019)

“…Debate moderators can play a key role by pointing out politicians’ incivility and intervening before situations escalate. Although it is likely that moderators themselves encourage incivility in order to adhere to media logic, too much incivility can also frustrate the viewer, decrease their trust in politics and in the media, and cause them to change channels (Goovaerts, 2022; Weber Shandwick et al, 2019). At the between-debate level, bivariate analyses showed that incivility levels are higher on the commercial broadcaster and when populist politicians are present, but the effects disappear when the other determinants are included and controlled for.…”