Taking Fact-Checks Literally But Not Seriously? The Effects of Journalistic Fact-Checking on Factual Beliefs and Candida
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Taking Fact‑Checks Literally But Not Seriously? The Effects of Journalistic Fact‑Checking on Factual Beliefs and Candidate Favorability Brendan Nyhan1 · Ethan Porter2 · Jason Reifler3 · Thomas J. Wood4
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Are citizens willing to accept journalistic fact-checks of misleading claims from candidates they support and to update their attitudes about those candidates? Previous studies have reached conflicting conclusions about the effects of exposure to counter-attitudinal information. As fact-checking has become more prominent, it is therefore worth examining how respondents respond to fact-checks of politicians—a question with important implications for understanding the effects of this journalistic format on elections. We present results to two experiments conducted during the 2016 campaign that test the effects of exposure to realistic journalistic fact-checks of claims made by Donald Trump during his convention speech and a general election debate. These messages improved the accuracy of respondents’ factual beliefs, even among his supporters, but had no measurable effect on attitudes toward Trump. These results suggest that journalistic fact-checks can reduce misperceptions but often have minimal effects on candidate evaluations or vote choice. Keywords Fact checking · Factual misconception · Corrections · Public opinion · Misinformation · Backfire effect
We thank Kim Gross, John Pfaff, and D.J. Flynn for comments and Kyle Dropp for fielding Study 1. This research received funding support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant Agreement No. 682758). We also received support from the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. All errors are our own. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1110 9-019-09528-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Thomas J. Wood [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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Political Behavior
Journalistic fact-checking is an important new form of political news coverage (e.g., Spivak 2011; Graves 2016). However, little is known about its effects on citizens. Do they accept fact-checks that conflict with their political affiliations or shrug off those that contradict the claims of their preferred candidates? These questions have important implications for debates over citizen competence and the quality of governance in democracies (e.g., Hochschild and Einstein 2015; Jamieson 2015). Concerns about people’s willingness to accept unwelcome factual information like counter-attitudinal fact-checks have become so widespread that Oxford Dictionaries named post-truth the word of the year after the 2016 U.S. elections (BBC 2016). These concerns are well-justified. Some research indicates, for instance, that people can be highly resistant to journal
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