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<p>We examine the dynamics of citizens’ trust in public media during government-led efforts to implement major media reforms in a highly polarized context using two cross-sectional experiments. After Poland’s Law and Justice party (PiS) lost its parliamentary majority in 2023, the new government promised to “restore impartiality” to public news outlets that PiS had previously transformed into government mouthpieces. We conducted two experiments—one before and one after the reforms. In both experiments, we showed Polish respondents a representative sample of content from public and private media outlets, randomizing the inclusion of source information. We find that, pre-reform, both content preferences and source cue effects followed a highly polarized partisan pattern. Post-reform, polarization in public media attitudes was eliminated, as trust in the public television brand increased among new government supporters and decreased among PiS supporters, such that the public television cue had a null effect on trust for both pro and anti-PiS respondents.</p>

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After the Takeover: Rebuilding Trust in Public Media Through Institutional Reform

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年3月11日

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  • Ashley Blum,
  • Gabriela Czarnek,
  • Adam J. Berinsky,
  • David G. Rand

摘要

We examine the dynamics of citizens’ trust in public media during government-led efforts to implement major media reforms in a highly polarized context using two cross-sectional experiments. After Poland’s Law and Justice party (PiS) lost its parliamentary majority in 2023, the new government promised to “restore impartiality” to public news outlets that PiS had previously transformed into government mouthpieces. We conducted two experiments—one before and one after the reforms. In both experiments, we showed Polish respondents a representative sample of content from public and private media outlets, randomizing the inclusion of source information. We find that, pre-reform, both content preferences and source cue effects followed a highly polarized partisan pattern. Post-reform, polarization in public media attitudes was eliminated, as trust in the public television brand increased among new government supporters and decreased among PiS supporters, such that the public television cue had a null effect on trust for both pro and anti-PiS respondents.