Project: RECLAIM

Authors: Martin Moland, Jacopo Custodi, Hans-Jörg Trenz and Asimina Michailidou

A large literature investigates what shapes people’s people’s perceptions of fake news. However, much of this literature has concerned itself with social media, ignoring the legacy media that still play an integral part in many people’s news diets. This paper uses a survey experiment in Norway, Italy and Poland to test whether a news medium’s level of tabloidization impacts how easily the same medium can serve as a vector for political mis- and disinformation. We find that greater levels of tabloidization causes less trust in the (false) information contained by a story about the EU. However, people’s tendency to trust the information varied both with people’s pre-existing beliefs about the EU and their news diets. This shows that people may be more likely to believe political misinformation spread through news channels that employ the tropes of “broadsheet journalism”, rather than the tabloid features common to both fake news disseminators and legacy tabloid media.