Abstract

Readers’ objectivity and bias evaluations of news texts were investigated in order to better understand the process by which readers make these kinds of judgments and the evidence on which they base them. Readers were primed to evaluate news texts for objectivity and bias, and their selections and metacommentary were analyzed. Readers detected bias in passages with stance markers, and detected objectivity in those lacking stance markers. In their metacommentary, readers tended to characterize objective texts as lacking purpose, or having a merely descriptive or expository purpose, and biased texts as exhibiting explicit interpretive or argumentative purposes. Unlike studies that locate objectivity or bias in news texts, or test it by asking about the fidelity of texts to their sources, our study examined the evaluations of readers in their interactions with texts. It shows how objectivity and bias evaluations are a multiply determined part of a communication dynamic rather than a fixed quality of a text.