Process / pipelineinstitutional-attitudes
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.
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Sources
- West, M. D. (1994). Validating a scale for the measurement of credibility: A covariance structure modeling approach. Journalism Quarterly, 71(1), 159-168. DOI: 10.1177/107769909407100116 ↗
- 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. link ↗