Measuring the Effect of Presentational Context and Image Authorship on the Credibility Perceptions of Newsworthy Images

Abstract

Photojournalists publish images they have created in news publications and on social media, and images captured by ordinary citizens sometimes appear in journalism spaces. This study examines how the professionalism of a photograph’s authorship and presentational context influence the perceived credibility of the image using a two (photographer; staff or amateur) by two (image presentational context; news site or social media) quasi experiment. The small difference in how respondents rate the credibility of the images suggests that, broadly, participants in this study are willing to accept newsworthy images as credible on social media, and social media images as credible in the news.