Media scholar cites misinformation concerns in election years

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Leading up to a presidential election, media scholars are concerned with a lack of trust in media and the spread of misinformation.

According to a Gallup poll, only 32% of Americans trust the mass media “a great deal” or “a fair amount.” This trust often lowers during election years.

Matthew Jordan, a Penn State professor of media studies, says this distrust can increase during election years because news organizations treat it like a horse race.

“Instead of talking about governance, instead of talking about the things that our democratically elected representatives do, they talk about the strategy to winning the race,” Jordan said. “It makes the average reader or viewer who is hearing about this stuff think it’s all a cynical game.”

This “horse race” version of election coverage is often further perpetuated by the political parties themselves. According to Jordan, parties prefer you get their information from their advertisements, but this usually includes attack ads against other candidates.

For adults under 30, getting news from social media is growing increasingly common. According to the Pew Research Center, 39% of adults under 30 report regularly getting their news from TikTok, and TikTok users are less likely than X (formerly Twitter) users to get news from the site.

For those who study the media, this breeds concerns that most of the news people get is attention-based rather than from verified sources.

Jordan said that getting news from social media can lead to a “news finds me” mentality when people begin to have more faith in a social media algorithm than journalists.

“It puts them in a passive position in relation to their own world and environment,” Jordan said. “It also puts them in a position of having more faith in technology than they do in their fellow human being or people who are professional journalists who should be more trustworthy than an algorithm.”

Jordan says this can be because the way news is presented on social media tends to be attention-based, meaning it is sensationalized and shortened so that people don’t scroll away. Social media news lacks the context that a good news story should have.

Social media news is often full of inaccuracies and biases, and platforms don’t always do their best to prevent this. Journalists follow a code of ethics that prevents them from spreading misinformation, but content creators don’t have this.

According to Jordan, people who post news online are often more worried about the amount of clicks they get than the accuracy of their information.

“Their professional code of ethics is essentially driven by the data they get,” Jordan said. “When people are on social media, they should be very wary of this.”

Social media platforms, however, have been moving away from monitoring the content posted on their sites. Many of the biggest platforms have dissolved their divisions that do this.

Media studies scholars recommend that people be willing to try verifying information on their own instead of believing everything on social media.

“Look for stories that have a reporter’s name on them, a byline, check out the source to make sure it’s accurate, all of these things people should do, especially in an election year when there so much information that’s being designed to push us into just a like or dislike relationship to these people were going to vote for,” Jordan recommended.

To help prevent the spread of misinformation and engage students in democracy, many colleges are participating in initiatives to encourage students to exercise their right to vote.

Penn State is one of over a thousand institutions in America that is a part of the All-In Campus Democracy Challenge, a national effort that supports student voting and engaged citizenship.

PSU Votes is an initiative from Penn State Student Affairs to help provide non-partisan information to students to help them prepare for and participate in elections. Voting resources such as voting guidelines and registration deadlines are available to all students.

Isabelle Charboneau is a fourth-year student majoring in digital and print journalism. To contact her, email ijc5186@psu.edu.