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Source v. Content Effects on Judgments of News Believability
Abstract
A between-groups 3 × 3 factorial experiment (N=516) tests effects of message type and source reputation on judgments of news believability, judgments conceptualized as source credibility (judgments about the source), and assessments of apparent reality (judgments about the message content). Three indices combining measures of source credibility and message apparent reality emerge from a factor analysis, comprising judgments of (1) source truthfulness and message accuracy, (2) source expertise and message representativeness, and (3) source bias and personal perspective. The results show that a more innocuous message results in more positive judgments of believability, but the reputation of the source has no direct effect on believability judgments, nor does it interact with message type. It is concluded that at least some publics base judgments of news believability more on judgments of the apparent reality of message content rather than on the reputation of the media source.
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Integrity signals
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In the citing paper
“the salience of source information does not appear to change how accurately people identify fabricated news stories55, manipulated images56, or false news headlines57,58”
From Human detection of political speech deepfakes across transcripts, audio, and video (2024) · cites this paper as [55]
Citations
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Cited by 144
Metadata
- Authors
- Austin, E. W., & Dong, Q.
- Venue
- Journalism Quarterly
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 1994-12
- Volume
- 71
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 973-983
- ISSN
- 0196-3031 (ISSN-L)
- 0022-5533
- OpenAlex
- W2084459705
- Cited by
- 144
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 12 · 2021: 9 · 2020: 9 · 2019: 2 · 2017: 5 · 2016: 1 · 2015: 6 · 2014: 7 · 2013: 3 · 2012: 11
- FWCI
- 10.65
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journalism Quarterly (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Communication › News Media Framing and Political Communication
- Social Sciences › Communication › Journalism and Media Studies
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Keywords
- source credibility, source reputation, message content, message types, message accuracy, source expertise, source bias, personal perspective
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Source v. Content Effects on Judgments of News Believability. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/107769909407100420
- The paper
- Austin, E. W., & Dong, Q. (1994). Source v. Content Effects on Judgments of News Believability. Journalism Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1177/107769909407100420
