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Cited by 272

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 50 of the 50 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Why Do People Watch News They Do Not Trust? The Need for Cognition as a Moderator in the Association Between News Media Skepticism and Exposure

Tsfati, Yariv, Cappella, Joseph N.·2005·Media Psychology

Abstract

Prior research has found only modest associations between news media trust and exposure. Many news skeptics report moderate to high levels of mainstream news exposure, despite their mistrust of mainstream news. Why do people watch news they do not trust? This study investigates the moderating role played by the psychological construct of "the need for cognition" (NFC) in this association. An NFC × Media Skepticism interaction is hypothesized and tested on survey data (N = 424). Results provide evidence for such an interaction. For those with a reduced NFC, mainstream media skepticism is strongly associated with news exposure. As NFC increases, the association between news skepticism and exposure disappears. It is concluded that people consume news they do not trust when their media skepticism is irrelevant to their motivation for news exposure.

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Metadata

Authors
Tsfati, Y., & Cappella, J. N.
Venue
Media Psychology
Published
2005-08
Volume
7
Issue
3
Pages
251-271
ISSN
  • 1521-3269 (ISSN-L)
  • 1532-785X
OpenAlex
W1985575435
Cited by
272
References
50
FWCI
8.41
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Why Do People Watch News They Do Not Trust? The Need for Cognition as a Moderator in the Association Between News Media Skepticism and Exposure. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1207/s1532785xmep0703_2
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Tsfati, Y., & Cappella, J. N. (2005). Why Do People Watch News They Do Not Trust? The Need for Cognition as a Moderator in the Association Between News Media Skepticism and Exposure. Media Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532785xmep0703_2

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.