Trump Lies, Truth Dies? Epistemic Crisis and the Effect of False Balance Reporting on Beliefs About Voter Fraud

Abstract

Media scholars have long recognized the potential for falsely balanced reporting to distort public opinion, but existing empirical evidence is inconclusive. In this study, we examine the effect of falsely balanced reporting and explicit journalistic intervention on perceptions of voter fraud in U.S. elections through original internet survey experiments conducted in the United States shortly before and after the 2020 U.S. presidential election held on November 3, 2020. The results show that exposure to falsely balanced reporting largely has a null effect on perceptions of voter fraud, though we also find evidence of partisan-based heterogeneity in its effect. The results of the study also show that explicit journalistic intervention equally decreases belief in voter fraud among both Democrats and Republicans before the election, but among Republicans the corrective effect of intervention disappears in the post-election period, suggesting that there are sharp contextual limits on the effect of explicit journalistic intervention.

Can Official Messaging on Trust in Elections Break Through Partisan Polarization?

“…Work on motivated reasoning and affective polarization point to the challenges of breaking through partisan polarization with new information. Some studies find this to be true in the realm of trust in elections, finding either that Republicans are unmovable (Wuttke et al 2022) or that correcting election-related misperceptions can backfire with GOP supporters (Holman and Lay 2018;Christenson et al 2021;Jenkins and Gomez 2022). By contrast, our findings are in keeping with studies demonstrating that political views can evolve together across party lines (Gerber and Green 1999;Hill 2017;Coppock 2022;Tapin et al 2023).…”