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Media Trust Scale/Evidence
Method evidence record

Media Trust Scale

The Media Trust Scale measures audience confidence in news media credibility, including perceptions of accuracy, fairness, completeness, and journalists' motivations. Developed by West (1994) and extended by Kiousis (2001), the scale captures both medium-specific trust (trust in TV news vs. newspapers vs. online news) and outlet-specific trust (CNN vs. Fox News vs. BBC vs. local news). Media trust is central to understanding political polarization, misinformation vulnerability, and the functioning of the democratic public sphere, as low-trust populations reject news sources entirely, opening space for alternative information ecosystems.

Sources recorded, not reviewed

Source record

Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.

Media Trust and Credibility Scale (MTS)
Taxonomic method record · process-pipeline / political-psychology
  • West, M. D. (1994). Validating a scale for the measurement of credibility: A covariance structure modeling approach. Journalism Quarterly, 71(1), 159-168. · DOI 10.1177/107769909407100115
  • Kiousis, S. (2001). Public trust or mistrust? Perceptions of media credibility in the information age. Mass Communication & Society, 4(4), 381-403. · DOI 10.1207/S15327825MCS0404_4
  • Pew Research Center. (2021). News consumption and media trust in an era of political polarization. Washington, DC: Pew Research Center. · URL
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Curated claims

Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.

No curated claims yet

This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.

Related methods

Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.

Same method familyConspiracy Mentality Questionnairemachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Taxonomic bucketPolitical Trust Scalemachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.Taxonomic bucketVoter Cynicism Scalemachine-suggested · Relational suggestion, not evidence.

Evidence status

Sources recorded, not reviewed

Bibliographic sources are present. Claim-level evidence review has not been performed.

Sources

3 recorded citations, copied from the method source record.

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