Differential Criteria for Evaluating Credibility of Newspapers and TV News

People use different criteria to judge credibility of TV news than they do to judge newspaper credibility. Television news credibility has relentlessly out-scored newspaper credibility for nearly three decades. By 1984, respondents asked by the Roper organization which medium they would select when confronted with conflicting news reports chose television 46% of the time versus 22% for newspapers.1 The idea that television is perceived as a more credible news source than newspapers, however, seems to contradict the notion that the print medium is more deliberate and thorough in its reporting, having more time and space, which allows more detailed and precise coverage of the news.2 The suggestion that newspapers are losing a credibility battle with television also seems inconsistent with the fact that newspaper readership remains high in American society. The 1985 national survey on which this study is based shows 72% of the people questioned read a newspaper three or more times per week.3 Since the 1950s, much of the research in this area has focused on defining the dimensions of the source that receivers use in assessing credibility.4 For example, Hovland and Weiss identified two dimensions of source credibility, trustworthiness and expertness.5 Berlo, Lemert and Mertz found three source factors, safety, qualification, and dynamism, which they call "not incompatible" with Hovland's results.6 Yet other factor or cluster analyses have found four dimensions or more.7 Singletary depicted source credibility to be "highly complex and somewhat undifferentiated," when his study found 16 factors.8 Delia, who views credibility to be made up of "situational constructs," also found factor structures that differ across sources, situations, and time.9 Unfortunately, these investigations into source credibility are of doubtful comparability, because of confusion as to whether these dimensions are predictors of perceived credibility or are dimensions of credibility itself.10 A second problem in studies of source credibility is the definition of what a source is. A critical omission, given later arguments, is that frequently no distinction is made between a person as source as opposed to an organization as source. Berlo, Lemert and Mertz, for example, asked respondents to make credibility comparisons between sources such as Dwight Eisenhower and the New York Times.11 Further confusion arises when the media channel becomes the perceived source of information. Abel and Wirth, for example, treat newspapers and television as competing sources in their study of local versus national and international news content.12 Others have attempted to distinguish between the source and the media channel by defining the person originating a message as the "internal source," and the mass medium transmitting it as the "external source. " For example, some have suggested that television has an advantage over newspapers in credibility assessments because "seeing is believing". 13 One notable similarity among studies that focus on source or channel characteristics is a failure to recognize that message receivers might judge different sources with different criteria.14 Thus, the criteria for credibility and the predictors of credibility may depend on the receiver's perspective on the medium. If credibility is defined from a receiver-oriented perspective, credibility is the degree to which an individual judges his or her perceptions to be a valid reflection of reality. Yet another dimension is added to the concept when information is mediated by machine technology-such as a television or a printing press-as is the case with modern mass media's reporting of the news. Mass media news credibility, then, is the perception of news messages as a plausible reflection of the events they depict. In this study, we will show that the criteria people use to judge television news credibility are different than those used to judge newspapers. …