Correlations Among Variables in Message

Although credibility is a complicated construct involving interrelationships among messenger, message, communication channels, and recipients, the most widely used credibility indexes seek to measure only one of those attributes at a time. This study used two widely used credibility scales to simultaneously measure message and messenger credibility. An analysis showed high correlations between the two scales and among their individual variables but still distinguished differences between messenger and message. Keywords messenger credibility, message credibility, journalism, scale verification Credibility is a long-studied construct with a literature that is “plentiful, contradictory, and confused ” (Self, 1996, p. 421) and has led to scores of operationalizations designed to measure its mercurial nature. Professional mass communicators and academicians use decades-old credibility scales and continue to create new scales, decades after Delia (1976) noted that scales neither “advance the theoretical understanding of the credibility concept ” nor explain alternative dimensions (p. 363). Despite the criticism, those scales still are used because of their ability to quantify an amorphous construct and because they have been proven reliable and appear to have both external and inter-nal validity. Whether industry driven (for example, see Pew Research Center for th