| The 24-hour nature of the Internet has altered the news landscape, and the pressure to break stories first has raised questions about the veracity of reported information. The present study examined whether sports journalism has experienced a diminished level of credibility, looking specifically at how article source, medium, fan identification, and user comment tone can all impact the credibility of the sports article or one's attitude towards a news or sports source.;An online experiment was distributed to participants (N = 376), who were randomly assigned a sports article in one of twelve stimuli groups. The article source was indicated to have appeared on a mainstream sports website (ESPN.com), a sports blog (alligatorarmy.com), a social networking site (Facebook(c)), or a wire service (Associated Press). Participants also received the stimuli with either positive user comments, negative user comments, or without comments as well as a pre- and post-test questionnaire.;Analysis revealed that fan identification level was an important factor in credibility ratings. There was minimal difference in credibility scores between the wire service and online medium and both were only seen as slightly credible. For the two identification groups, highly identified fans found the article to be significantly more credible than fans with low identification as a whole and in 11 out of 12 stimuli groups. Highly identified fans also rated all three websites significantly higher than low identification fans. The disparity in ratings was evident as highly identified fans rated all the online sources favorably, and low identification fans rated all the websites slightly negatively, except for Facebook(c). Both identification groups rated the blogs as the least favorable online source, and Facebook(c) was the only website that received a positive score from each group.;Additionally, scores on the user identification scale were significantly higher for the positive comments than for the negative comments for both highly identified fans and fans with low identification. User comments did not, however, affect credibility ratings or evaluation scores of the sports sources. The implications of fan identification level on the discrepancies in ratings of perceived credibility and attitudes toward a sports source were explored. |
