Social Networking Sites – (Un)Trustworthy News Sources?
Social Networking Sites – (Un)Trustworthy News Sources?

Summary/Abstract: The impact of social networking sites on journalism is increasing in Croatian journalism. The journalists are balancing between using social networking sites as free and fast news sources, and maintaining the professional standards in news reporting. The aim of the paper is to examine whether social networking sites can be considered trustworthy news sources and consequently, whether the media content in which social networking sites are used as news sources should be trusted by the media audience. The study presents a content analysis of media reports in three Croatian daily newspapers and on three Croatian news portals on the 17-year-old Croatian girl’s disappearance in June 2011, in which Croatian journalists used the Facebook page created by the missing girl’s family as a source. The results of the study have been used to evaluate whether journalists have been following professional standards while using social networking sites as news sources, and whether their practice is in accordance with the four-dimensional model of trust in news media introduced by Kohring and Matthes (2007). Our evaluation shows that the main professional standards and all of the four dimensions of trust in media have been violated in the analysed articles.

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