The Impact of Increasing and Decreasing the Professionalism of News Webpage Aesthetics on the Perception of Bias in News Articles.

This paper reports further results from a large study examining the impact of the visual aesthetics of news websites on the perception of bias in news articles. It focuses on the characteristic of professionalism, which is of particular importance to mainstream news websites. Nine news articles were amended to create a range of biased content. They were then paired with webpages from nine popular news websites which underwent common cumulative distortions to degrade the professionalism of their aesthetics. Pre-tests confirmed the effectiveness of these processes. A crowdsourced experiment and ANOVA analysis (N = 405, \\(\\alpha \\) = 0.05, ES = 0.24) demonstrated a negative correlation between the professionalism of the aesthetics and perceptions of bias. These effects were common across all nine news websites and news articles with different levels of bias.