Preliminary research presented at the Convergence and Society conference in South Carolina suggests that comments on a news story affect the perception of bias in the story itself.

Michele Jones, a Phd student at the University of North Carolina, wanted to investigate the impact that comments had on credibility and reader perception of bias in the news

She conducted an online experiment with 76 participants reading a story about abortion which carried either pro-life or pro-choice comments.

What she found was that readers who have strong opinions will perceive bias against their side in a news story. This is called the Hostile Media Effect and has been found in numerous studies.

But the picture was more confused when it came to the impact of comments on perceptions of bias.  A statistical analysis showed that the comments themselves did not lead readers to see more bias in the story.

However, the participants were also able to add their thoughts at the end of the study and these suggested that the nature of the comments affected how the story was perceived.

So, for example, people might see the original story as balanced, but the tone of the comments made them wonder if the journalist had deliberately chosen pro-life or pro-choice comments.

Jones sees this study as a starting point as it throws up interesting questions about the relationship between a news story and the discussion around it.

At a time when many news outlets are experimenting with different forms of user-generated content, this is an area that would benefit from further study.