Trust in News Media [by Perception of Police Violence]

People that report high trust in news media think that police are more violent today than in the past.

Subsequent mediation analysis indicates that people with higher levels of educational attainment may be more misinformed about fatal police shootings, in part, because of their relatively higher trust in news
media.

Our findings are convergent with other work on education and media:

1. Yudkin, Hawkins and Dixon (2019) found that higher educational
   attainment was associated with greater inaccuracy about others’
   political attitudes.
2. Rosling and colleagues (2018) show that intellectuals are reliably
   cynical and uninformed about important trends (e.g., assuming
   global poverty is rapidly rising when it is rapidly falling).
3. These are particularly disconcerting trends when coupled with
   what Rafail and McCarthy (2018), and others have shown--that
   cable news reporting is consistently slanted toward the biases of
   viewers.