Toxic talk? How online incivility can undermine perceptions of media credibility

TL;DRAbstract

Online news environments differ from more traditional news environments on a number of dimensions. First, the traditional, standalone news article or TV news broadcast may be a thing of the past. Instead, online news is increasingly contextualized by information coming from other news consumers. This includes comments responding to blog posts, or Facebook "likes" on news articles, as well as user-generated ratings systems for news articles. Second, and related, audience members themselves are actively participating in this changing news environment, with thirty-seven percent of Internet users posting news items or commenting on stories via social media sites (Purcell, Rainie, Mitchell, Rosenstiel, & Olmstead, 2010). Furthermore, twenty-five percent of Internet users report they have posted comments to a news story (Purcell et al., 2010). The Internet brings together social and mass communication sources in a simultaneous and physically proximate fashion, raising questions about how ind

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