Bad Impressions: How Journalists as “Storytellers” Diminish Public Confidence in Media

Abstract

A somewhat common journalistic branding effort is use of the cue “storyteller.” To better understand the impression the “storyteller” brand leaves, we fielded a survey-embedded experiment from a national sample of 2,133 US adults. The randomly assigned treatment credits a news article on a local political matter to a journalist using the “storyteller” brand. Drawing on media bias survey questions from the literature and sentiment analysis, we find consistent evidence that the “storyteller” cue lowers positive response to the journalist among respondents (although there remain various research avenues for additional insights on this topic).