Sapir Eliyahu V
Department of Political Science, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands.
SN Soc Sci. 2022;2(10):226. doi: 10.1007/s43545-022-00534-1. Epub 2022 Oct 7.
Trust in the news media received wide scholarly attention for almost a century, which was further boosted as a result of recent developments in the media landscape and changes in how news is made and consumed. Despite that, the conceptualization of trust in the news media is still debated, and its measurement comparability has not yet been established. In this paper, I build up on earlier conceptualizations of trust in the news media, and test three theoretically derived measurement models to determine their cross-cultural equivalence in 28 EU countries. Using Eurobarometer data, I test the validity and comparability of these measurements employing multi-group confirmatory factor analysis. The findings indicate that trust is a unidimensional latent construct, equally interpreted across contexts. People's level of trust in the news media reflects their general attitude to the news stories and reporters in all sources of media they are exposed to. While bifactorial measurements of news media trust, differentiating between legacy and online sources, have some merit in single case-studies, they are non-invariant and therefore non comparable. This means that any cross-population differences found employing them are likely a function of measurement idiosyncrasies or other unknown factors.
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s43545-022-00534-1.
对新闻媒体的信任在近一个世纪里受到了广泛的学术关注，由于媒体格局的最新发展以及新闻制作和消费方式的变化，这种关注得到了进一步提升。尽管如此，对新闻媒体信任的概念化仍存在争议，其测量的可比性尚未确立。在本文中，我在早期对新闻媒体信任的概念化基础上进行拓展，并测试三种理论推导的测量模型，以确定它们在28个欧盟国家的跨文化等效性。利用欧洲晴雨表数据，我采用多组验证性因素分析来测试这些测量的有效性和可比性。研究结果表明，信任是一个单维潜在结构，在不同背景下有相同的解释。人们对新闻媒体的信任程度反映了他们对所接触的所有媒体来源中的新闻报道和记者的总体态度。虽然对新闻媒体信任的双因素测量，区分传统媒体和在线媒体来源，在单一案例研究中有一定价值，但它们不具有不变性，因此不可比。这意味着使用它们发现的任何跨人群差异可能是测量特性或其他未知因素的作用。
在线版本包含可在10.1007/s43545-022-00534-1获取的补充材料。
