Broadcast News Fact-Checks: “Empathetic” and Traditional Approaches Produce More Accurate Beliefs

This preregistered survey experiment ( n = 1,056) examines audience responses to empathetic versus traditional broadcast news fact-checks about COVID-19. An empathetic fact-check leads the audience through the debunking process to enhance relevance, while a traditional one merely presents facts; a weather story serves as the control. Both fact-checks improved belief accuracy about one COVID-19-related topic, but not another. However, the empathetic approach was not more effective than the traditional one, although both were more effective than the control. Democrats and those who vaccinated their children rated both fact-checks as more credible than Republicans and those who did not, highlighting growing partisan divides.