‘Split Screens’ and ‘Spin Rooms’: Debate Modality and the New Videomalaise.

Recent research has found that the levels of incivility in televised debate exchanges adversely affect political legitimacy, particularly when the appearance of contentiousness is intensified through the use of broadcast production techniques such as close-up camera perspectives (Mutz & Reeves, 2005). Our experimental research builds on these findings to examine how different modalities of presidential debate presentations (single screen or split screen) and post debate spin (no spin, policy focused, or performance focused) influence judgments of political trust and news credibility. No direct effects of these manipulations are observed, but building on work by Eveland and Shah (2003), we find that political talk conditions certain experimental effects on perceptions of news credibility, but not political trust. Specifically, news credibility is adversely affected by the use of split screen presentations, but only among those who engage in higher levels of political talk. Thus, it appears that the negative effects of “in your face” politics may be reserved for those more attuned to politics through the interpersonal exchange of views on policy and government and limited in scope to judgments about media credibility, not political trust. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]