| Sumario: | Trust in media Mainstream media,[1] namely newspapers and broadcast television, have suffered a decline in trust in recent decades that coincides with declines in print circulation and news viewership as news consumers turn to alternative sources such as cable news channels, talk radio, and social media, including political blogs (Tsfati & Ariely, [66]; Tsfati & Cappella, [67]). Because of the strong criticism of the veracity of newspaper and television coverage of the 2016 presidential candidates, which might have affected the processing of political news, this study asks the following research question: RQ3: Was heuristic or systematic processing the stronger predictor of trust in mainstream news (newspapers, television broadcast) during the 2016 presidential campaign? Because users are often inadvertently exposed to news and fake news on social media that they may share without ever reading, and because people seek political blogs that support their opinion and thus do not require much effort to process, this study hypothesizes: H5: Trust in social media during the 2016 presidential campaign is more strongly predicted by heuristic processing than by systematic processing.
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