Priming, Fake News and Effects of Elite Discourse Creative Writing

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Priming, Fake News and Effects of Elite Discourse
Introduction
Fake news is described as misleading news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false. The study explores the implications of fake news on the public’s evaluation of news media arising out of elite discourse. Particular importance is paid to the dissemination of information that is false by the elites without caution or context. These elites include politicians, journalists, activists and some government officials.
There is a need to understand how fake news shapes political outcomes. This study extends the existing literature on fake news and its effects by assessing how a factor such as talking about fake news by elites has an effect on media trust and public’s ability to discern between what is real or fake news. To examine this, the following study was conducted.
Participants were randomly assigned to one of 4 conditions and exposed to one of two sets of tweets from elites. They were then exposed to either fake or real articles. As the first variable, elite discourse, was manipulated by exposing participants to tweets about fake news (treatment) or federal budget (control). To achieve the realistic aspect, articles were pretested while tweets included cues about media outlets and groups like National Public radio. Conditions tested were; identification of fake or real news, media trust and political knowledge. In the fake news condition, participants were able to accurately identify 1.67 articles on average (SD=0.97) when compared to 1.89 articles (SD=1.03) in the real news condition. On average, individuals trusted media organizations ‘some of the time’ m=2.30 SD=0.66. Political knowledge was used as control due to its association with the effects of elite messages.
Priming is when processed information is stored on top of an individual’s memory and recalled to ...