Open AccessHow do we raise media bias awareness effectively? Effects of visualizations to communicate bias
Author(s) -
Timo Spinde,
Christin Jeggle,
Magdalena Haupt,
Wolfgang Gaissmaier,
Helge Giese
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
plos one
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.99
H-Index - 332
ISSN - 1932-6203
DOI - 10.1371/journal.pone.0266204
Subject(s) - media bias , perception , confirmation bias , biology and political orientation , politics , ideology , social psychology , psychology , political science , neuroscience , law
Media bias has a substantial impact on individual and collective perception of news. Effective communication that may counteract its potential negative effects still needs to be developed. In this article, we analyze how to facilitate the detection of media bias with visual and textual aids in the form of (a) a forewarning message, (b) text annotations, and (c) political classifiers. In an online experiment, we randomized 985 participants to receive a biased liberal or conservative news article in any combination of the three aids. Meanwhile, their subjective perception of media bias in this article, attitude change, and political ideology were assessed. Both the forewarning message and the annotations increased media bias awareness, whereas the political classification showed no effect. Incongruence between an articles’ political position and individual political orientation also increased media bias awareness. Visual aids did not mitigate this effect. Likewise, attitudes remained unaltered.