‘Did this really happen or not?’: Exploring news doubt and its antecedents

In recent decades, scholars have made great efforts to analyse and monitor audiences’ levels of trust in news and information. To capture these levels, research has primarily relied on concepts such as news (dis)trust, media scepticism or cynicism. While these concepts provide valuable insights, they also tend to oversimplify news consumers as either trusting or distrusting of the news, thereby ignoring the presence of uncertainty and variability in news evaluations. To fill this gap, this article explores variable experiences of news doubt, moments when people feel uncertain about the accuracy of a news story. Based on 31 semi-structured interviews with news consumers, this article first empirically explores how and when news doubt is experienced. Second, at a more theoretical level, it considers whether news doubt can truly be seen as a concept distinct from other related concepts such as news distrust or media scepticism. The results show that all participants experience moments of news doubt, but that it is interpreted in different ways and caused by a variety of triggers (e.g. sensationalism, partisanship). Conceptually, the findings suggest that news doubt may have explanatory value as a theoretical concept on its own.