“To Me, There’s Always a Bias”: Understanding the Public’s Folk Theories About Journalism

Advancing a qualitative turn in news media trust research

“…By employing a constructivist approach in the UK context, they discovered that distrust in the news entails also a refusal to collude with stereotyped depictions conveyed by news media, which implies a disengagement from a certain vocabulary for constructing social meaning. Relying on the folk theories framework and focusing on the US context, Wilner et al (2021) found that while their focus group participants "articulated a desire for active journalists to provide evidence for the larger truths in a story, they also seem to seek a more passive approach, as they perceived a story as biased if it contained facts or context they perceived as unnecessary" (12). In short, they described a kind of journalism that seems impossible to achieve but that gains meaning when seen from the interviewees' perspectives (see also Nelson & Lewis, 2021).…”

“…Relying on the folk theories framework and focusing on the US context, Wilner et al. (2021) found that while their focus group participants “articulated a desire for active journalists to provide evidence for the larger truths in a story, they also seem to seek a more passive approach, as they perceived a story as biased if it contained facts or context they perceived as unnecessary” (12). In short, they described a kind of journalism that seems impossible to achieve but that gains meaning when seen from the interviewees' perspectives (see also Nelson & Lewis, 2021).…”

Rollin’ papers: Newspaper coverage of cannabis legalization in Canada

“…Much of the framing literature identifies that newspapers and news media can evoke strong emotional responses from their audiences while reinforcing stereotypes and guiding the perceptions and understandings of an issue (Islam & Fitzgerald, 2016). Popular media—newspapers, television, websites, and social media—act as critical sources of information and play essential roles in shaping opinion (Kim & Kim, 2018; Wilner et al, 2021). These forms of media often reach a much wider audience and communicate in a more appropriate language than academic research, policy briefs, or legislation (Hallin & Mellado, 2018; Kim & Kim, 2018; McGinty et al, 2016).…”

Shifting the protest paradigm? Legitimizing and humanizing protest coverage lead to more positive attitudes toward protest, mixed results on news credibility

“…While there is an implicit connection between how a protest story is told and whether readers perceive that story as credible (e.g., Harlow and Johnson, 2011), it is largely unexplored whether legitimizing or humanizing coverage may influence whether people perceive the story as credible. On the one hand, it is plausible that delegitimizing and criminalizing protest coverage would be perceived as more credible because it follows the unwritten U.S. journalistic practices that the U.S. public has grown accustomed to (Wilner et al, 2021). For example, given the plethora of evidence that the news media regularly cover protests in ways that cast protesters and their causes in a negative light (e.g., Brown et al, 2019; Brown and Harlow, 2019; Harlow et al, 2020; Harlow and Brown, 2021, 2022; McIlwain, 2020; Richardson, 2020; Schmidt, 2023), it is logical that the U.S. public may see stories told a different way as operating outside the norm.…”