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Can an Algorithm Reduce the Perceived Bias of News? Testing the Effect of Machine Attribution on News Readers’ Evaluations of Bias, Anthropomorphism, and Credibility
Abstract
Although accusations of editorial slant are ubiquitous to the contemporary media environment, recent advances in journalism such as news writing algorithms may hold the potential to reduce readers’ perceptions of media bias. Informed by the Modality-Agency-Interactivity-Navigability (MAIN) model and the principle of similarity attraction, an online experiment ( n = 612) was conducted to test if news attributed to an automated author is perceived as less biased and more credible than news attributed to a human author. Results reveal that perceptions of bias are attenuated when news is attributed to a journalist and algorithm in tandem, with positive downstream consequences for perceived news credibility.
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“Source disclosure to machines can influence how audiences perceive communication; for instance, research shows that messages from machine journalists are often viewed as less biased and, therefore, more credible than those authored by human journalists (Waddell 2019).”
From Artificial Intelligence in Crisis Communication: Investigating Source Effects and Matched Crisis Responses on Stakeholder Perceptions (2026) · cites this paper as Waddell 2019
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“Principles of human–human communication such as similarity attraction are often generalizable to nonhuman actors (e.g., K. M. Lee, Peng, Jin, & Yan, 2006; Nass & Moon, 2000; Reeves & Nass, 1996).”
BackgroundThe Influence of Source Credibility on Communication Effectiveness
Hovland, C. I., & Weiss, W. (1951) · Public Opinion Quarterly · doi:10.1086/266350 · Cited by 3,543 · cited 1×
“A long tradition of research has examined the factors that contribute to evaluations of message credibility (e.g., Carter & Greenberg, 1965; Hovland & Weiss, 1951; McCroskey, 1966; Metzger, Flanagin, Eyal, Lemus, & Mccann, 2003).”
BackgroundStatistical mediation analysis with a multicategorical independent variable
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Social and Heuristic Approaches to Credibility Evaluation Online
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Cited by
Rise of Machine Agency: A Framework for Studying the Psychology of Human–AI Interaction (HAII)
Sundar, S. S. (2020) · Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication · doi:10.1093/jcmc/zmz026 · Cited by 871
Graefe, A., & Bohlken, N. (2020) · Media and Communication · doi:10.17645/mac.v8i3.3019 · Cited by 154
“Given that we were interested in readers’ perceptions of human-written vs. automated news, we excluded experiments that used journalists as recipients (e.g., Jung, Song, Kim, Im, & Oh, 2017, Experiment 2) or analyzed hybrids of human-written and automated news (e.g., Waddell, 2019a).”
MethodMolina, M. D., & Sundar, S. S. (2024) · New Media & Society · doi:10.1177/14614448221103534 · Cited by 124
Is artificial intelligence more persuasive than humans? A meta-analysis
Huang, G., & Wang, S. (2023) · Journal of Communication · doi:10.1093/joc/jqad024 · Cited by 95
Rheu, M. (., & Cho, J. (2025) · Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3706599.3719681 · Cited by 9
Schneider, E., Kyriakopoulos, V., Seo, Y., Hong, N., Lee, M., & Lim, J. S. (2026) · Corporate Reputation Review · doi:10.1057/s41299-026-00254-9 · Cited by 4
Metadata
- Authors
- Waddell, T. F.
- Venue
- Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2019-01-25
- Volume
- 96
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 82-100
- ISSN
- 1077-6990
- 2161-430X
- Cited by
- 122
- References
- 7
- Language
- en
- Licence
- journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license (tdm)
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