| The decline of mainstream media credibility, along with the Internet's rise of alternative voices, has heightened calls for news organizations to be more transparent in their news reports and in their decision-making. The general assumption is that greater transparency will lead to greater credibility, but little research has tested that assumption. This dissertation describes 31 dimensions of journalistic transparency, along a continuum of opaque to translucent to transparent, organized using the well-known mass-communication model of source-message-channel-receiver. It posits 10 hypotheses related to three of those dimensions. It tests those hypotheses, though a pair of field experiments conducted on a Southeastern daily newspaper's Web site, in which some participants have access to the additional evidence used to create the news stories and access to Editor's notes that explain why and how the stories were created. None of the hypotheses was supported, suggesting that increased transparency in already evidence-rich, non-controversial messages published by a well-known messenger will do little to boost perceived credibility of message or messenger. Notwithstanding the lack of observed relationships between journalistic transparency and credibility, the dissertation concludes with a discussion of the utility of transparency in the conduct of ethical journalism. |
