The Power of a Genre: Political News Presented as Fact-Checking Increases Accurate Belief Updating and Hostile Media Perceptions

Concerns over misinformation have inspired research on how people are influenced by, and form perceptions of, media messages that aim to correct false claims. We juxtapose two seemingly incongruent expectations from the theories of motivated reasoning and hostile media perceptions, uncovering the unique effects of presenting a political news story with corrective information as a “fact-check.” We test our theoretical expectations through two online survey experiments. We find that compared to a conventional style of news reporting, a news story presented in a fact-checking genre significantly increases how accurately people are able to evaluate factual information, but it also comes with an important counterproductive effect: people will be more likely to perceive the journalist and the story as biased. We discuss the implications of our findings in theorizing the persuasion effects of corrective information in the contemporary media environment.