Date of Award

2020

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Honors Thesis

Department

Communications

First Advisor

Lindsay Ems

Abstract

This research seeks to explore how news media, traditional versus new, influences public trust, as well as, what types of consumers use traditional versus new media. My hypotheses are that (A) that those who use primarily new media to access news will have less trust in the news they are consuming and (B) those who have at least a college degree, are below 30 in age, and use, daily, a computer in the course of their work, will use primarily new media to access news. Using an online survey administered through the platform Qualtrics, distributed through Amazon Mechanical Turk, I surveyed over 1,000 American citizens and was able to conclude that my hypothesis (A) was true, those who use new media are less trusting; and that my hypothesis (B) was false in totality, but that those who do use a computer daily use new media and when age is not categorized, it is true that as people get older, they are less likely to use new media.

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