Assessment of motion media on believability and credibility: An exploratory study

The radical shift by news audiences away from newspaper to motion media (video stories on TV, web, cell phones, handhelds) prompted the assessment of media modality (text, text + picture, video) and source (public relations, news, user-generated content UGC]) effects on credibility and more importantly perceived veridicality, a perception of an object as being accurate and believable regardless of the source, as well as impact of messages. The findings revealed that motion media modality significantly enhances believability judgments and perceived veridicality, which is independent of source cue, in which news source garnered no greater credibility than PR or UGC source.