ABSTRACT
When people read news content, do they rate it differently based on related but different metrics like perceived quality or trustworthiness? This chapter leverages results from an experiment run in the U.S. on a news aggregator platform called NewsLens, where participants rated articles they chose to read based either on quality or on trust. This novel experimental research design that blends passive online data collection with traditional surveys shows that most users do not distinguish between quality and trust. Yet, the results show political independents, conservatives, and those with low trust in journalists rate articles higher on the quality scale than on the trust scale. These findings suggests that public opinion surveys asking about trust in the media may not capture a complete picture of how certain sub-groups view the media. Moreover, researchers should compare results from different studies that use different metrics for capturing attitudes toward the media with some caution, since those metrics may measure different constructs for some segments of the population.
