Cherry-Picking Tolerance About Untruthful News

People are increasingly worried about untruthfulness in news reporting. We distinguish between two types of untruthfulness: apparent untruthfulness (containing false information) and consequential untruthfulness (giving readers a wrong impression of the truth). Consequential untruthfulness can be caused by both the presence of false information and cherry-picking (reporting only parts of the truth). Despite this, we find that people's perception of untruthfulness depends largely on apparent untruthfulness. Consequently, they treat news that cherry-picks information less negatively (e.g., less likely to criticize it and more likely to share it with others) than they treat news that contains false information, when the former is more consequentially untruthful than the latter. We dub this phenomenon as cherry-picking tolerance. We also find that prompting people to think about the consequence of the news report (i.e., the impressions people form after they read the news reports) will mitigate the cherry-picking tolerance. This research draws attention to the widespread practice of cherry-picking in news reporting and calls for a new look at what constitutes fake news.