News Quality from the Recipients' Perspective

Abstract

Fierce competition on the Web, increased commercialization and a turbulent economic environment may prompt media organizations to violate journalistic quality norms in order to remain competitive. Media users or recipients are then more likely to be confronted with factually inaccurate, incomplete or biased news. One would hope that at least some recipients prefer high-quality media over low-quality media and this preference will counteract pressures on media organizations to downgrade their product. But this hope is based on the assumption that recipients can evaluate the quality of news appropriately. Communication scholars, however, typically argue that recipients are unable to judge media with regard to these normative quality criteria since they lack the appropriate background and professional knowledge to make such judgements. This study investigates how far this is true. A series of 2 × 2 factorial online experiments test whether recipients of news recognize the quality of news items measured by the criteria of diversity, relevance, ethics, impartiality, objectivity and comprehensibility. Results indicate that recipients do recognize differences in quality to some extent where they reflect issues of relevance, impartiality and diversity. But recipients found it hard to evaluate the ethics, objectivity and comprehensibility of a news item. Furthermore, media brand images proved to be an important heuristic when recipients have to evaluate news quality. The results show that it is difficult for recipients to judge news coverage with regard to identified normative quality criteria. However, the audience is by no means completely unable to identify a lack of quality in the news.