Stein is an associate professor of marketing at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Meyersohn is pursuing an Ed.S. in school psychology California State University, Long Beach.
Pointing out that someone else is wrong is a part of life. And journalists need to do this all the time – their job includes helping sort what’s true from what’s not. But what if people just don’t like hearing corrections?
Our new research, published in the journal Communication Research, suggests that’s the case. In two studies, we found that people generally trust journalists when they confirm claims to be true but are more distrusting when journalists correct false claims.
Some linguistics and social science theories suggest that people intuitively understand social expectations not to be negative. Being disagreeable, like when pointing out someone else’s lie or error, carries with it a risk of backlash.
We reasoned that it follows that corrections are held to a different, more critical standard than confirmations. Attempts to debunk can trigger doubts about journalists’ honesty and motives. In other words, if you’re providing a correction, you’re being a bit of a spoilsport, and that could negatively affect how you are viewed.
How we did our work
Using real articles, we investigated how people feel about journalists who provide “fact checks.”
In our first study, participants read a detailed fact check that either corrected or confirmed some claim related to politics or economics. For instance, one focused on the statement, “Congressional salaries have gone up 231% in the past 30 years,” which is false. We then asked participants about how they were evaluating the fact check and the journalist who wrote it.
Although people were fairly trusting of the journalists in general, more people expressed suspicions toward journalists providing corrections than those providing confirmations. People were less likely to be skeptical of confirmatory fact checks than they were of debunking articles, with the percentage of respondents expressing strong distrust doubling from about 10% to about 22%.
People also said they needed more information to know whether journalists debunking statements were telling the truth, compared with their assessment of journalists who were confirming claims.
In a second study, we presented marketing claims that ultimately proved to be true or false. For example, some participants read an article about a brand that said its cooking hacks would save time, but they didn’t actually work. Others read an article about a brand providing cooking hacks that turned about to be genuine.
Again, across several types of products, people thought they needed more evidence in order to believe articles pointing out falsehoods, and they reported distrusting correcting journalists more.
Why it matters
Correcting misinformation is notoriously difficult, as researchers and journalists have found out. The United States is also experiencing a decadeslong decline of trust in journalism. Fact-checking tries to help combat misinformation and disinformation, but our research suggests that there are limits to how much it helps. Providing a debunking might make journalists seem like they’re just being negative.
Our second study also explains a slice of pop culture: the backlash on someone who reveals the misdeeds of another. For example, if you read an article pointing out that a band lied about their origin story, you might notice it seems to create a sub-controversy in the comments of people angry that anyone was called out at all, even correctly. This scenario is exactly what we’d expect if corrections are automatically scrutinized and distrusted by some people.
What’s next
Future work can explore how journalists can be transparent without undermining trust. It’s reasonable to assume that people will trust a journalist more if they explain how they came to a particular conclusion. However, according to our results, that’s not quite the case. Rather, trust is contingent on what the conclusion is.
People in our studies were quite trusting of journalists when they provided confirmations. And, certainly, people are sometimes fine with corrections, as when outlandish misinformation they already disbelieve is debunked. The challenge for journalists may be figuring out how to provide debunkings without seeming like a debunker.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.