Theme: Trust and Engagement with Online News: Fact vs Opinion based Reporting

Guest Speaker: Prof. Uwe DULLECK，Executive Dean, Faculty of Business, Government & Law, UC；Simon HOY, Associate Dean (Partnerships and International), Faculty of Business, Government & Law

Time:  Monday, November 4, 2024, 9:30-10:45am

Venue: 405, Business School Building

Organizer: Department of Economics

Guest Bio:

  Uwe Dulleck is Professor of Economics and Executive Dean of the School of Business, Government and Law at the University of Canberra, Australia. Professor Dulleck's research focuses on incentive economics using traditional economics as well as experimental and behavioral methods. His papers have appeared in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Economic Literature, the Journal of International Industrial Organization, the Economic Journal, and the Journal of Public Economics, among others. His research has been discussed in The Economist's Economic Focus, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (the Sunday edition of Germany's leading high-quality newspaper), The Sydney Morning Herald, Forbes Magazine, and The Age, as well as on radio and television programs. Uwe has received four Australian Research Grants (ARC Grants) and is a co-investigator of two Austrian research grants. He has been a visiting professor at the Universities of Linz, Berlin, and Vienna, and has given mini-courses to graduate students in the United States, Europe, and China.

Synopsis：

  Trust and participation in the news play a crucial role in society. In this paper, we examine whether readers understand and react differently after reading fact-based and opinion-based media pieces, and hope to shed light on the reasons for increased subjectivity in journalism. Our analysis is based on additional survey data from the Digital News Report (DNR) 2023 sample in three countries: Australia, Singapore and the UK. In an embedded experiment, we randomly assign viewers to different types of news pieces (and different types of platforms). We found that viewers were less likely to understand opinion pieces but more likely to engage with opinion pieces than fact-based pieces, which may explain the trend of increasing subjectivity in reporting and the problem of misinformation associated with this trend.