Media Cynicism, Media Skepticism and Automatic Media Trust: Explicating Their Connection with News Processing and Exposure

In an era of increasing attention to media trust, some have argued that differentiating between media cynicism and media skepticism (as both attitudinal and behavioral concepts) can advance a more nuanced understanding of media trust and its implications. While previous efforts conceptualized cynicism and skepticism as separate discrete phenomena, this allows the seemingly illogical possibility that some people would score high on both cynicism and skepticism. Additionally, these previous studies failed to demonstrate whether media cynicism and skepticism actually matter for audience reading and processing of news media content. After conceptualizing these terms on a single continuum varying between automatic rejection to automatic trust, Study 1 offers a procedure to test whether cynics process news stories faster, and whether skeptics’ trust in different news stories varies more compared to cynics’. Given that skepticism was hypothesized to reflect more deliberate thinking, we also tested whether media skeptics provide different kinds of justifications when asked to explain their evaluations of specific news stories, compared to cynics and trustors. Studies 2 and 3 test theoretically-driven hypotheses about automatic-trust, skepticism and cynicism and find that cynics’ and automatic trustors’ general evaluations of media are based on partisan reasoning and skeptics’ evaluation of the media is independent from their political ideology. Skeptical audiences were also found to consume more news and from a diversity of sources.