Media Largely Frames Trump’s Victory Declaration as False in Headlines
Authors: Melinda Haughey, Andrew Beers, Kate Starbird, University of Washington Center for an Informed Public
The way the media frames misinformation plays a role in how the public interprets, remembers and ultimately believes the information. After President Donald Trump claimed victory during a press conference early this morning, media outlets faced the challenge of how to report it.
A best practice for covering misleading claims is to debunk the falsehood in the headline. This is because people frequently only read the headline without exploring the content in the article — when the misinformation is repeated in the headline, it sticks. To understand how — and whether — the media rose to that challenge, our research team analyzed headlines from breaking news stories reporting on his statements that were published in the hour after Trump’s early morning press conference (2:30-3:30AM, EST, Nov. 4). We specifically looked at how media outlets framed President Trump’s victory claim in headlines across different partisan groups, as determined by MediaCloud in their 2019 partisan media rankings.
Fortunately, we saw many left, center left, center, and center right media organizations either correct or qualify Trump’s statement explicitly in their headlines. Some used very direct corrections, such as the common “falsely claims,” whereas others used qualifications, such as “despite uncounted votes.” We did not witness any right-labeled news organizations state outright that Trump’s claim was false, although some did offer qualifications such as “with many states still undeclared.” Only 6 of the 59 stories we analyzed noted that President Trump declared victory without further qualification. These articles had little reach on both Twitter and Facebook.
A breakdown of how media outlets with different political leanings described President Trump’s false claim of victory in breaking news headlines. With the exception of right-leaning outlets, most headlines either explicitly labeled Trump’s claim as false, or qualified his statement. Some headlines only used the word “claimed” or “declared” to describe Trump’s words, and still others quoted him directly. The stories here come from a collection of over 13,000 media outlets collected by MediaCloud. We use MediaCloud’s labels for political leaning as of 2019, and only included stories published in the hour after Trump’s speech.
We know that people rely on headlines for information as they scroll through social media.
While 8 out of the top 10 articles most shared on Facebook correctly identified President Trump’s misleading claim in the headline, only 4 of the top 10 articles retweeted on Twitter did so. Editors should expect unsubstantiated or outright false claims to be made in the coming weeks of this election, especially around the voter fraud narrative. it is imperative that they follow the example of their peers who did correct Trump in their headlines as they navigate the coming days and weeks of uncertainty.
