This study was conducted by the Media Insight Project, an initiative of the American Press Institute (API) and The Associated Press NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The study was funded by API. Staff from API and The AP-NORC Center collaborated on all aspects of the study. The study featured two surveys. Interviews for the […]

Story 1. Pollution story Standard Version At-risk neighborhood now facing new health threat from toxic drinking water A toxic chemical has polluted drinking water at a local mobile home park, making it the latest low-income community to face a public health crisis due to the nation’s deteriorating infrastructure. Lab testing shows tap water at the […]

Moral Foundations Theory Questionnaire This survey used a battery of questions often used in academic studies to assess respondents’ inclinations toward values in Moral Foundations Theory. Below is the specific set of questions we used to create variables for the moral foundation values in this study: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity. MFT1. WHEN YOU […]

Despite partisan differences, Americans’ attitudes about journalism are more complicated than a simple Democrat versus Republican divide. To better understand how values relate to views of the news media, this study used a “k-means cluster analysis,” a statistical technique that groups people together based on their answers—in this case, their moral values and views toward […]

Half of the current decline in trust occurred before the widespread adoption of the public internet and so much news coverage moved online and or to social media. It took place roughly between 1980 and 2000. That timing correlated to the advent of cable and the deregulation of electronic media, which ended rules like the Fairness […]

While the majority of our research looked at how moral foundations intersect with perceptions of core journalistic concepts and content, we also wanted to test how people’s values influence how they perceive the marketing messages that encourage them to pay or donate for news. The study found a strong correlation between people’s moral instincts and […]

The panel of experts in the working session included: Susan Benkelman – American Press Institute, Director of Accountability Journalism; Jenny Benz, PhD, – AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, Deputy Director; Maria Carrillo – Tampa Bay Times, Deputy Editor/Enterprise; Joel Christopher – Knoxville News Sentinel and knoxnews.com, Executive Editor; Noreen Gillespie – Associated Press, Deputy […]

To provide our own baseline for trust with respondents, we began by asking about their level of trust in the news media. We asked the question differently than Gallup does annually—giving people three levels of trust to choose from rather than five—but the results are basically similar. Overall, about 40% of people say the media […]

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