Summary. Priming and Fake News. Communications & Media Essay

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Priming and Fake News
Fake news is prevalent in today’s society due to avenues like social media that have made the relay of information easier than in traditional news media. According to Allcott and Gentzkow (2017), fake news refers to articles that are false and are deliberately designed to mislead the readers. The information has great significance in how people get to view and perceive things in society thus the media which is the main information provider can effectively manipulate the stance of individuals on certain matters through fake news. This is priming where the media has a major influence on the judgment and decision making its audiences. Fake news was prevalent in the 2016 presidential election with both candidates Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton being victims of it. This led to increased speculations of the influence of the news on the final outcome and the way people voted. This essay looks at an article by Emily Van Duyn & Jessica Collier in which they document the results of an experiment designed to determine the effects of elite discourse on fake news and priming on the public’s evaluation of news media. CITATION Duy18 \l 1033 (Duyn and Jessica)
The method used in this study is an experiment designed to have a 2 x 2 between-subjects and we manipulate whether participants were or were not primed by discourse about fake news and whether they received real or fake news articles. CITATION Duy18 \l 1033 (Duyn and Jessica) The study was approved by d Institutional Review Board approval on April 19, 2017, and data collection started on April 25-27 the same year. The recruitment of the participants for the study happened on g Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform with only individuals residing in the United States and ...