Network Evening News Coverage of the TWA Hostage Crisis

AbstractIyengar et al. (1984, The Evening News and Presidential Evaluations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46(4): 778–87) discovered the media priming effect, positing that by drawing attention to certain issues while ignoring others, television news programs help define the standards by which presidents are evaluated. We conducted a direct replication of Experiment 1 by Iyengar et al. (1984, The Evening News and Presidential Evaluations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46(4): 778–87) with some changes. Specifically, we (a) collected data from Japanese undergraduates; (b) reduced the number of conditions to two; (c) used news coverage of the issue of relocating US bases in Okinawa as the treatment; (d) measured issue-specific evaluations of the Japanese Prime Minister in the pre-treatment questionnaire; and (e) performed statistical analyses that are more appropriate for testing heterogeneity in the treatment effect. We did not find statistically significant evidence of media priming. Overall, the results suggest that the effects of media priming may be quite sensitive either to the media environment or to differences in populations in which the effect has been examined.

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Politicians, the Media, and Negative Perceptions of Trade’s National Effect

10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190651824.003.0007 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Alexandra Guisinger

Keyword(s):

Public Discourse ◽

National Level ◽

News Coverage ◽

Political Campaigns ◽

Economic Knowledge ◽

Political Campaign ◽

Evening News ◽

Mass Public ◽

Campaign Ads ◽

The Media

Chapter 7 explores how the framing of trade in public discourse – mass media and political campaigns –supports the disconnect between mass and elite opinion: while academic elites have stressed the benefits of free trade and political elites have supported trade liberalization, the mass public continues to express a negative assessment of trade’s economic impact on the U.S. This chapter describes past and current public beliefs about trade’s effect at the national level and characterizes two common sources of Americans’ economic knowledge – the national media and federal-level political campaigns. Analysis of decades of trade–related evening news coverage, illustrates both the correlation between bad trade indicators and trade coverage and the frequency and tone of evening news coverage. Additionally, the chapter offers qualitative analysis of the content of trade-related political campaign ads as well as two maps showing the concentration of trade-related ads in the 2000 and 2008 elections. This analysis of the content of TV news coverage of stories about international trade and political campaign ads that mention trade makes it clear that the messages communicated to the mass public differ from the academic/elite consensus.

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