Assembling Public Support for the United Nations: Examining the Impact of Media Trust on One's Policy Preferences toward the United Nations - An Experimental Test.

I test whether treatment group subjects' political awareness, partisanship, and media trust moderates the persuasive impact of positive news about the UN, and different media sources reporting that information, on subjects' UN policy preferences. Of particular interest is whether subjects' level of trust in the news media moderates the impact of the treatments on subjects' stated UN policy preferences. Building on the Reception-Acceptance-Sample model's theoretical axioms (Zaller 1992), this paper hypothesizes that media trust plays a central role in moderating the persuasive impact of political messages shaping political opinions. OLS regression results suggest that treatment group subjects' policy preferences were generally more positive compared to the control group, taking into consideration the relevant moderators. The strongest positive policy preferences were associated with strong Democratic treatment group subjects with high political awareness and high general media trust. OLS regression analysis did not indicate any statistically significant interaction effect among treatment group subjects' political awareness, partisanship, and trust in specific media sources that they were exposed to in the experiment. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]