Measuring The Concept Of Credibility

Every day millions of people across the United States scroll through their phones or flip through their favorite news channels on the television to catch up on the latest political information from what they believe are credible sources. However, just how trustworthy, credible, and transparent are these sources of mass communication. Do these media sources always show both sides of the story that they are presenting or just the side they want people to see? In their 1986 Journalism Quarterly article “Measuring the Concept of Credibility” Cecilie Gaziano and Kristin McGrath identified twelve dimensions for media credibility, “they included fairness, bias, completeness, accuracy, respect for privacy, watch for peoples’ interests, concern for

As our media has evolved over the years, it as ruined what once was a symbiotic relationship between the audience and the news source. The media is now a hulking gatekeeper allowing only what it wants seen to be shown. The agenda used to be set by elite political actors but is now set by major media conglomerates who have turned the general public into passive consumers whose interpretation of the agenda is limited to the views of the mass media. Modern political beliefs of the general public are now being shaped by our current media environment and therefore making the distinction between what is news and what is not unidentifiable. University of Michigan Professor of Communication and Political Science Stuart Soroka defines gatekeeping

The first is organizational-level factors such as cost and time constraints. The second is story-level factors is which based on story type. The third factor is professional factors which include values, norms, and views of the journalist. When producing news content, a station will often take into account journalists’ practices and values. As the media and its journalists are shaping the current political beliefs of the general public, there is a discussion that can be made about whether there is a liberal or conservative bias. If there is a bias towards one party over the other, this would greatly solidify the gatekeeper theory. A bias such as this has the ability to sway the belief of its audiences as it will represent the negative side of one party and the positive side of the other by deciding what political information is being released. This bias is only strengthening the theory that the audience is yet a passive consumer whose interpretation of the current political agenda is decided by the view of the mass media. In our nation today as the walls between politics and the media are eroding more and more every day, “the resulting media environment is rearranging traditional power relationships as the authority of journalists, public officials, and other political gatekeepers is increasingly challenged by other producers of political and social meaning – including the public itself” (Delli Carpini &