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.

Keywords

political incivility news media experimental design political trust news credibility

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