Media Trust & Partisanship in Africa: A Pre-Analysis Plan for Conjoint Survey Experiment in Ghana

How do citizens evaluate information from partisan media actors in recently liberalized settings? Media environments in many countries, including those in Sub-Saharan Africa, have seen increasing pluralism, but many outlets have notable partisan biases, due to ownership, political pressures, or other financial concerns. Layered on to this phenomenon of media capture are general concerns about mis-, dis-, and malinformation (MDM). This pre-analysis plan lays out a conjoint experiment designed to test how citizens in Ghana, a relatively young African democracy with burgeoning, but often captured, mass media, evaluate news on the basis of a) partisan outlet bias, b) copartisanship with subjects of reportage, and c) independent fact-checking.