A popular aspect of online journalism is the ability of users to quickly comment on news stories and posts.  Depending on a site’s degree of moderation, such content can be an insightful exchange of opinions — or highly partisan rants, often about supposed media bias. News organizations are grappling with ways to curtail online incivility yet keep dialogue open. Research suggests that such forums can serve as a proxy for public opinion. Could they also influence how readers perceive journalistic content?

A 2012 study published in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, “That’s Not the Way It Is: How User-Generated Comments on the News Affect Perceived Media Bias,” investigated the extent to which user-generated comments on Internet news articles shaped readers perceptions. In the study, 214 participants read a neutral article on corporal punishment in elementary schools with comments that either supported or challenged the article. Afterward, the participants were tested for their perceptions of the article’s neutrality, public opinion on the issue and the comments attached to the article.

Key study findings include:

• Given the way certain kinds of readers process news information, some cannot properly distinguish where information came from; the data suggest that “people might misattribute the opinions expressed in others’ comments to the news article.” Reader comments can, in effect, filter news: “[U]ser-generated comments accompanying news stories significantly altered the participants’ beliefs about what other members of the society think…. By changing the participants’ beliefs about the amount of public support, users’ comments exerted indirect effects on their evaluation of the news….”
• Individuals who were invested in a topic and primed with comments supportive of their position were less likely to perceive hostile media bias in the article’s content than those who also read supportive comments but were less personally invested.
• Opinions of participants who were less involved in an issue were not significantly affected by critical comments on media coverage. “Although they, too, inferred public opinion from users’ comments, they did not seem to consider it relevant when judging news bias.”
• “All readers got a sense of what public opinion was on the basis of what the user-generated comments said, but when readers who considered the news topic to be more important to them inferred from the comments that public opinion was on their side, they saw significantly less bias in the news story.”
• “Exposure to other readers’ comments concordant with one’s own position led to perceptions of more congenial public opinion … and the more congenial participants thought that public policy opinion was, the less hostile their perceptions of the news story was.”

Readers invested in an issue and fearful that their position is “losing ground” in the press are more likely to perceive hostile media bias, the researcher suggested. Comments that matched participants’ opinions on the issue reduced impressions of bias, while those that didn’t increased it. Invested readers may also read comments more carefully and process content differently than those less familiar with a topic.

A 2013 study also published in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, “Crude Comments and Concern: Online Incivility’s Effect on Risk Perceptions of Emerging Technologies,” features similar findings. As the authors note in a New York Times editorial based on the study, “Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.”

Tags: cognition, technology

By Margaret Weigel | November 19, 2012