How Brand Identity Affects Perceptions of the News

William Youmans and Katie Brown, PhD candidates at the University of Michigan, have published a fascinating paper on how Al Jazeera English is viewed in the United States.

In their study, they showed 177 participants a news clip [above] of “the Taliban’s position towards peace talks.”

The first group watched the original clip with AJE’s branding…

…The second group saw the same news piece re-edited to carry CNN International’s (CNNI) logo…

…The third group, the control, viewed no clip. We then asked participants in each group to rate, in general, how biased they thought AJE and CNNI were.

Watching the AJE clip — branded as AJE — did not seem to have an impact on perceptions of bias; bias ratings were equal between those in the AJE-clip-watching group and the control group.

But in the group that had just watched the clip with fake CNNI branding, participants rated CNNI as less biased than those in the control group.

Paper (PDF) | Arab Media Society | Nieman Lab

Youmans and Brown go on to discuss AJE’s difficulty breaking into the US cable market, saying the issue is part politics and part perceived market potential.

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