Media use and corruption perceptions: the mediating role of political trust and moderating role of group differences

Abstract Although media use has long played a central role in research on political attitudes, its relationship with corruption perceptions remains insufficiently understood. Drawing on the Differential Susceptibility to Media Effects Model (DSMM), this study uses data from the seventh wave of the World Values Survey to examine how traditional and digital media use are associated with corruption perceptions, with political trust modeled as a mediating mechanism. It further investigates whether these pathways differ by gender, education, and settlement type. The findings reveal a differentiated pattern of media effects. Traditional media use is not directly associated with corruption perceptions, but is linked to lower perceived corruption through higher political trust. Digital media use is directly associated with higher perceived corruption, and also indirectly linked to higher perceived corruption through lower political trust. The multi-group analyses further show that the trust-mediated pathway linking digital media use to corruption is stronger among men, whereas the direct association between digital media use and corruption perceptions is more pronounced among less-educated respondents. No significant settlement-type differences were found in the digital media pathways, and no significant gender, education, or settlement-type differences were found in the traditional media pathways. By extending the DSMM framework to the study of corruption perceptions, this research highlights differentiated media-effect pathways across media types and audience groups, and contributes to research on mediated political cognition and offers implications for understanding how media environments, political trust, and anti-corruption governance intersect in contemporary China.