Examining Readers’ Evaluations of Objectivity and Bias in News Discourse

Peter Cramer Simon Fraser University ; Christopher Eisenhart University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

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.

Journal
Written Communication
Published
2014-07-01
DOI
10.1177/0741088314532429
Open Access
Closed

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  1. Written Communication
  2. Written Communication
  3. Written Communication
  4. Journal of Business and Technical Communication
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Also cites 4 works outside this index ↓
  1. 10.1017/S004740450001037X
  2. The linguistic individual: Self-expression in language and linguistics
  3. 10.1177/1461445603005002006
  4. 10.1177/146488490100200310
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