Arab Media & Society

Participants

Our sample includes 177 Americans recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online survey community, who participated in exchange for $0.25 or $0.50. The mean participant age was 30.29, with a range of 17 to 67. About 66 percent of the participants were female. The average participant (59 percent) lived in a suburb, though 22 percent described their residential area as “urban” and 19 percent as “rural.” The average participant has completed some college coursework. Half of the participants identified as Christian, 17 percent as agnostic, and 13 percent as atheist. The majority of participants (80 percent) were white. Other ethnicities represented include Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders (10 percent), African-Americans (4 percent), Latino/as (4 percent), and Arab-American (less than 1 percent). The mean political ideology on a 7-point scale was 3.45, or moderate. The vast majority of participants (98 percent) do not watch AJE or CNNI regularly. However, CNNI was the most popular source of TV news among respondents (18 percent), followed by Fox News (16 percent).

Procedure

Participants completed the study online. The first part of the study included several questions about their news viewing habits. Participants were then⁶ randomized into one of three conditions: AJE, CNNI, or control. Participants in the AJE and CNNI conditions viewed a news story about the Taliban and its position towards peace talks with the government in Kabul that originally aired on AJE.⁷ The clip did not mention the United States nor depict any American forces or figures. AJE markings were removed and replaced with CNNI branding for the CNNI condition. Those in the control condition did not watch a video. Participants were then asked to indicate how biased and trustworthy they would rate AJE and CNNI and their intention to watch AJE and CNN, all on a 7-point Lichert scale. Participants were also asked “If your local cable company was considering carrying Al Jazeera English (CNN International), would you have a preference or try to influence its decision?”, with 5 options ranging from “I would directly pressure the company in support of carrying Al Jazeera English (CNN International)” to “I would directly pressure the company against carrying Al Jazeera English (CNN International).” Participants first answered the questions for whichever news condition they were in and then the other network, presented in a brief description as a competing news station. The order of network question presentation in the control group was counter-balanced such that half answered AJE questions first, while half saw CNNI questions first; no differences were found between responses across these two groups, indicating no ordering effects. Participants were then asked to indicate which network they would trust more for news about the Arab world. Next, we gauged Arab-American prejudice using questions adapted from Bushman and Bonacci’s (2004) Arab-American Prejudice scale, an 11-question inventory reduced in the present study to six questions under Bushman’s guidance. Participants were then asked if they believed “AJE represents an Arab outlook on the news.” Three questions about the events in Egypt came next, all answered on a 5-point Lichert scale: Do you sympathize with the Egyptians who protested and overthrew their leader Hosni Mubarak, a long time ally of the United States?; Do you think American foreign policy, including its military presence in the Middle East, is helping to spread democracy to Egypt and other countries in this region?; and Do you think that Al Jazeera as a network contributed to the protests against Egypt's President Mubarak? Finally, all participants answered basic demographic questions, including political ideology, and were debriefed.

Results

The bias questions yielded the most significant differences. As illustrated by Figure 1, the bias ratings for AJE differed between

conditions. Those who viewed the clip marked as AJE ranked the station as less biased than those in the control and CNNI