Study Claims Even the Most Sophisticated News Readers Can Be Manipulated

There's nobody more cynical about the media than your average European.

Only 12 percent of Europeans claim to trust the media, compared to 15 percent of North Americans, 29 percent of Pacific Asians and 48 percent of Africans, the BBC has found.

Yet new research out of the London School of Economics and Political Science suggests that even the most hardened Europeans may succumb to media manipulation and change their political views if they are bombarded long enough with biased news.

Michael Bruter, a senior lecturer in European politics at the school, fed a steady diet of slanted newsletters about Europe and the European Union — either all good news or all bad — to 1,200 citizens of six countries over two years.

Over time, Bruter found, and without exception, the readers subconsciously adopted the bias to varying degrees and changed their view of the EU and of themselves as Europeans, a few of them in the extreme. Surprisingly, they didn't register any change right after the newsletters stopped — not until full six months later, when they had obviously let down their guard.

Bruter calls this the "time bomb" effect of one-sided news. His study paints a blunt picture of how cynicism, far from inoculating citizens to resist political persuasion, merely delays the impact.

"We know that an increasing proportion of citizens distrust the media and that some explicitly claim to discount bias in the news that they receive," he wrote. "However, we show that despite this qualified reading strategy, the effect of news resounds over time.

Bruter did not study American media, but his research raises questions about the effects of long-term exposure to polarized television news on outlets such as the FOX and MSNBC networks — which are currently first and second respectively in cable news ratings. The Obama administration recently called FOX News Channel a political opponent and not a legitimate news organization.

The "time bomb" effect calls into question whether the cynicism of modern-day citizens actually makes them more vulnerable to the very journalistic sources they distrust and feel immune to, Bruter said.

Thus, British citizens, the most cynical of all, may be alert to the anti-EU slant of their media, yet the study suggests they can be nonetheless be manipulated to feel significantly less European than others, Bruter said.

The media, he said — and particularly, the tabloids — should stop brushing aside accusations of bias with assertions that "their audiences are mature and sophisticated and can take what they say with a pinch of salt."

"By contrast, my findings suggest that even sophisticated audiences are indeed susceptible to manipulation," he said. "As such, the big lesson for the media is that it does have a responsibility."

Bruter became intrigued with the question of media and identity after the citizens of France and the Netherlands voted down a proposed constitution for the European Union in 2005. This setback, he said, made it imperative to figure out whether the media was influencing "why some citizens feel more European than others."

Bruter designed a two-year experiment in which he sent biweekly newsletters containing biased news about Europe and the EU to up to 200 each in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium, Portugal and Sweden. These countries represented both large and small, rich and poor, pro-European and "Euroskeptic" members of the EU.

Each four-page newsletter, compiled from daily and weekly European papers, included two pages of articles exclusively about Europe and the EU, either all positive or all negative.

Thus, for example, one group of participants would read about how European heads of state agreeing to jointly fight drug trafficking, Airbus overtaking Boeing as the world's No. 1 airplane manufacturer, and the value of the euro going up, while another group would read about the value of the euro going down, Airbus losing a large order in China to Boeing, and heads of state failing to agree on how to fight organized crime from the former Eastern bloc.