What’s happening:
In a “news without labels” experiment, Gallup and the Knight Foundation partnered to create an experimental news platform to research audience views on the trustworthiness of media content and study reader bias.
Why it matters:
Gallup survey data indicates that Americans are increasingly distrustful about the potentially biased news. But this experiment shows that they should also worry about the partiality of their own judgment.
How it works:
Bias is notoriously difficult to measure, and most scientists agree that blind review is the best way to test it. The Gallup/Knight experiment pulled news stories from diverse media outlets and invited a random sample of 3,081 Americans to rate the trustworthiness of the content.
Half of the participants were allowed to see the source of the news they were rating, while the other half was not allowed to view the source. The results showed that the group reading the articles “blind,” without knowing the source, were significantly more trusting of the content.
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