Media Studies Faculty Publishes Journal Article
Alexander Moe, PhD, recently collaborated on an article titled: “Public thoughts on incentivizing COVID-19 vaccine uptake in the United States: testing hostile media bias with user-generated comments.”
The article was published under open-access in Frontiers in Sociology: Media Governance in the Public Sphere.
Along with collaborators from Texas Tech University and University of North Florida, their study found that intense story topics covered in the news, has the ability to influence perceptions of bias.
Further, the research team explored to what extent topics and comments per se interacted with one another. They found that the more intense a story topic (e.g., Human conflict vs rising interest rates) where user commentary is likeminded in terms of what is discussed, the more hostile perceptions about the integrity of the media reporting on the issue.
The article stems from a series of articles published thanks to funding from The Waterhouse Family Institute (WFI), at Villanova University, originally awarded in July, 2020.