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Traditional Versus Internet Media in a Restricted Information Environment: How Trust in the Medium Matters

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A Correction to this article was published on 12 October 2019

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Abstract

We use original survey data from Malaysia to explore differences in how traditional and digital media shape the attitudes and behavior of citizens. In closed, and even semi-authoritarian, states such as Malaysia, the Internet, including social media, is often the only place for opposition-centered media to thrive. As a result, consumption of Internet media is related to dissident attitudes. We argue that this relationship, though, is mitigated by trust in the medium. Our results suggest: (1) trust in traditional and Internet media determines the frequency with which citizens use each corresponding medium to gather political information, (2) higher trust in traditional media is positively associated with attitudes about democratic conditions in Malaysia; the opposite is true for trust in Internet media, (3) trust in the traditional media is negatively related, and trust in Internet media is positively related to the inclination to protest, (4) the positive relationship between digital media consumption and this attitude is stronger for those who trust Internet media, and diminished among those who trust traditional media.

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Change history

  • 12 October 2019

    The original version of this article unfortunately contained a mistake. The gender dummy variable was mistakenly coded in reverse order. The interpretation treated it as (0 = Male, 1 = Female), while the actual coding was (0 = Female, 1 = Male). This had no influence on the substantive results for all other variables. The sign on the coefficients for the female dummy in Tables 2, 3, and 4 should be negative. The word “females” should be “males” on page 414, and “women” should be “men” on page 416.

Notes

  1. The data and replication code are available on the Political Behavior Dataverse page https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/polbehavior.

  2. While the rate of missingness across the variables used here was generally low (less than 2 percent for the majority of indicators), we decided to use multiple imputation to replace any missing values to prevent possible bias in our estimates. The imputation model was based on all of the variables utilized in the present study assuming a multivariate normal distribution. Five replicate datasets were created where the missing data in each replication are substituted with draws from the posterior distribution of the missing value conditional on observed values (Little and Rubin 2014). The models that follow are based on pooled results of the five replicate datasets.

  3. We report the comparative L1 statistics in the notes of each of corresponding tables containing the model results. For a more complete description of the theory and our application of CEM see the Online Appendix and Blackwell et al. (2010) and Iacus et al. (2012).

  4. These are all opposition outlets which helps our index pick up on trust aimed specifically at the news sources that run counter to the state-controlled media.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Amanzhol Bekmagambetov, Ben Epstein and Michael James Jensen for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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Correspondence to Jason Gainous.

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Gainous, J., Abbott, J.P. & Wagner, K.M. Traditional Versus Internet Media in a Restricted Information Environment: How Trust in the Medium Matters. Polit Behav 41, 401–422 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-018-9456-6

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