Counting the Pinocchios: The effect of summary fact-checking data on perceived accuracy and favorability of politicians

• Main Authors: Alexander Agadjanian, Nikita Bakhru, Victoria Chi, Devyn Greenberg, Byrne Hollander, Alexander Hurt, Joseph Kind, Ray Lu, Annie Ma, Brendan Nyhan, Daniel Pham, Michael Qian, Mackinley Tan, Clara Wang, Alexander Wasdahl, Alexandra Woodruff
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publishing 2019-08-01
• Series: Research & Politics
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168019870351

Can the media effectively hold politicians accountable for making false claims? Journalistic fact-checking assesses the accuracy of individual public statements by public officials, but less is known about whether this process effectively imposes reputational costs on misinformation-prone politicians who repeatedly make false claims. This study therefore explores the effects of exposure to summaries of fact-check ratings, a new format that presents a more comprehensive assessment of politician statement accuracy over time. Across three survey experiments, we compared the effects of negative individual statement ratings and summary fact-checking data on favorability and perceived statement accuracy of two prominent elected officials. As predicted, summary fact-checking had a greater effect on politician perceptions than individual fact-checking. Notably, we did not observe the expected pattern of motivated reasoning: co-partisans were not consistently more resistant than supporters of the opposition party. Our findings suggest that summary fact-checking is particularly effective at holding politicians accountable for misstatements.