Journal article
“Fair and balanced”: what news audiences in four countries mean when they say they prefer impartial news
- Abstract:
- Impartial news, or news without a partisan slant or overt point-of-view, is overwhelmingly preferred by news audiences worldwide, yet what such preferences mean remains poorly understood. In this study, we examine what people mean when they say they prefer impartial news. We draw on qualitative interviews and focus groups with 132 individuals in Brazil, India, the UK, and the US, conducted in early 2021. Our results show while the idea of impartial news is widely embraced in abstract, ranging from notions of reporting “just the facts” to more nuanced views about how feasible impartiality is to achieve, there is no shared understanding of impartiality in practice. People’s perceptions of impartiality are rooted in two intertwined folk theories: the notion that news production and editorial decisions are guided largely by (a) partisan political agendas or (b) commercial considerations, determining what stories were chosen, ignored, or crafted in order to deceive and manipulate. There is some country variation around the importance of these folk theories, but their recurrence suggests that demonstrating impartiality to audiences requires convincing them not only that news content is balanced but also that editorial decisions were not driven by ulterior motives.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 1.7MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1080/1461670x.2023.2201864
Authors
- Publisher:
- Taylor and Francis
- Journal:
- Journalism Studies More from this journal
- Volume:
- 24
- Issue:
- 9
- Pages:
- 1131-1148
- Publication date:
- 2023-04-25
- Acceptance date:
- 2023-04-07
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1469-9699
- ISSN:
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1461-670X
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1339210
- Local pid:
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pubs:1339210
- Deposit date:
-
2023-04-28
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Mont’Alverne et al
- Copyright date:
- 2023
- Rights statement:
- © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author (s) or with their consent.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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