scholarly journals Selection in a Snapshot? The Contribution of Visuals to the Selection and Avoidance of Political News in Information-Rich Media Settings

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-68
Author(s):  
Thomas E. Powell ◽  
Michael Hameleers ◽  
Toni G. L. A. van der Meer
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
News Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Selective Exposure ◽  
Gun Control ◽  
Political News ◽  
Rich Media ◽  
Multimodal Text ◽  
Media Environments ◽  
Attitudinal Response

The psychological bases of the selection and attitudinal response to news media have received ample attention in political communication research. However, the interplay between three crucial factors in today’s online, high-choice news media settings remains understudied: (1) textual versus multimodal (text-plus-visual) communication; (2) attitude congruent versus attitude incongruent versus balanced content; and (3) political versus nonpolitical genres. Relying on an experimental study of refugee and gun control news in the United States ( N = 1,159), this paper investigates how people select and avoid, and also the extent to which they agree with, congenial, uncongenial, and balanced political news in a realistic multimodal selective-exposure setting in which political news is presented alongside sports and entertainment news. Although the findings partially depend on the issue, we find that the presence of multimodal (compared to textual) entertainment and sport items can increase avoidance of political news. Multimodal (compared to textual) political news augments attitude congruent selective exposure instead of encouraging cross-cutting selective exposure. Once selected, multimodal political news articles evoke stronger emotions and lead to higher issue agreement than textual news, regardless of an article’s attitude congruence. By linking research on text-alone to multimodal selective exposure, this study shows that visuals in high-choice media environments can contribute to the selective avoidance of political news generally and cross-cutting political news more specifically.

Common Sense or Gun Control? Political Communication and News Media Framing of Firearm Sale Background Checks After Newtown

2016 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma E. McGinty ◽  
Julia A. Wolfson ◽  
Tara Kirk Sell ◽  
Daniel W. Webster
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
News Media ◽  
Public Health Problem ◽  
State Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Core Values ◽  
Gun Control ◽  
Background Checks ◽  
Background Check

Abstract Gun violence is a critical public health problem in the United States, but it is rarely at the top of the public policy agenda. The 2012 mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, opened a rare window of opportunity to strengthen firearm policies in the United States. In this study, we examine the American public's exposure to competing arguments for and against federal- and state-level universal background check laws, which would require a background check prior to every firearm sale, in a large sample of national and regional news stories (n = 486) published in the year following the Newtown shooting. Competing messages about background check laws could influence the outcome of policy debates by shifting support and political engagement among key constituencies such as gun owners and conservatives. We found that news media messages in support of universal background checks were fact-based and used rational arguments, and opposing messages often used rights-based frames designed to activate the core values of politically engaged gun owners. Reframing supportive messages about background check policies to align with gun owners' and conservatives' core values could be a promising strategy to increase these groups' willingness to vocalize their support for expanding background checks for firearm sales.

The Architecture of Our Discontent

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yochai Benkler ◽  
Robert Faris ◽  
Hal Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
News Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Online Media ◽  
First Year ◽  
Media Ecosystem ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Right ◽  
Integrated Media ◽  
Presidential Election Campaign

This chapter presents the book’s macrolevel findings about the architecture of political communication and the news media ecosystem in the United States from 2015 to 2018. Two million stories published during the 2016 presidential election campaign are analyzed, along with another 1.9 million stories about Donald Trump’s presidency during his first year. The chapter examines patterns of interlinking between online media sources to understand the relations of authority and credibility among publishers, as well as the media sharing practices of Twitter and Facebook users to elucidate social media attention patterns. The data and mapping reveal not only a profoundly polarized media landscape but stark asymmetry: the right is more insular, skewed towards the extreme, and set apart from the more integrated media ecosystem of the center, center-left, and left.

Media-Effects Experiments in Political Decision Making

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan Gervais
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
Media Effects ◽  
News Media ◽  
Survey Methodology ◽  
Causal Power ◽  
Selective Exposure ◽  
Experimental Methodology ◽  
Methodological Choices ◽  
Mediating Role ◽  
Mass Opinion

Recognizing its causal power, contemporary scholars of media effects commonly leverage experimental methodology. For most of the 20th century, however, political scientists and communication scholars relied on observational data, particularly after the development of scientific survey methodology around the mid-point of the century. As the millennium approached, Iyengar and Kinder’s seminal News That Matters experiments ushered in an era of renewed interest in experimental methods. Political communication scholars have been particularly reliant on experiments, due to their advantages over observational studies in identifying media effects. Although what is meant by “media effects” has not always been clear or undisputed, scholars generally agree that the news media influences mass opinion and behavior through its agenda-setting, framing, and priming powers. Scholars have adopted techniques and practices for gauging the particular effects these powers have, including measuring the mediating role of affect (or emotion). Although experiments provide researchers with causal leverage, political communication scholars must consider challenges endemic to media-effects studies, including problems related to selective exposure. Various efforts to determine if selective exposure occurs and if it has consequences have come to different conclusions. The origin of conflicting conclusions can be traced back to the different methodological choices scholars have made. Achieving experimental realism has been a particularly difficult challenge for selective exposure experiments. Nonetheless, there are steps media-effects scholars can take to bolster causal arguments in an era of high media choice. While the advent of social media has brought new challenges for media-effects experimentalists, there are new opportunities in the form of objective measures of media exposure and effects.

scholarly journals Digital Media and the Entrenchment of Right-Wing Populist Agendas

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 205630511988532 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralph Schroeder
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
News Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Electoral Success ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Manipulation ◽  
Political Divide

Since Brexit and the election of President Donald Trump, news media around the world have given extensive coverage to the issue of disinformation and polarization. This article argues that while the negative effects of social media have dominated the discussion, these effects do not address how right-wing populists have been able to successfully and legitimately use digital media to circumvent traditional media. The article uses the United States and Sweden as case studies about how digital media have helped to achieve electoral success and shift the political direction in both countries—though in quite different ways. It also argues that the sources of right-wing populism go beyond the hitherto dominant left–right political divide, capturing anti-elite sentiment, and promoting exclusionary nationalism. The dominance of the issue of media manipulation has obscured the shift whereby the relation between the media and politics has become more fluid and antagonistic, which fits the populist agenda. This shift requires a rethinking of political communication that includes both the social forces that give rise to populism and the alternative digital channels that entrench them, with implications for the prospects of the role of media in politics in the two countries and beyond.

The Impact of the Gulf War on the Ingredients of Presidential Evaluations: Multidimensional Effects of Political Involvement

1993 ◽  
Vol 87 (4) ◽  
pp. 963-975 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon A. Krosnick ◽  
Laura A. Brannon
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
Foreign Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Involvement ◽  
Military Conflict ◽  
Political News ◽  
Gulf Crisis ◽  
Overall Performance ◽  
Multidimensional Effects ◽  
The Impact

When the United States began its overt military conflict with Iraq in January 1991, the news media focused unceasingly on the Gulf crisis. Using national survey data, we show that this emphasis altered the ingredients of Americans' assessments of George Bush's performance. After the war, assessments were based more on beliefs about Bush's effectiveness in managing the conflict and less on confidence in his handling of other foreign relations matters or the domestic economy. Consequently, Bush's overall performance ratings increased dramatically following the war. We also show that the media's impact on political judgments was regulated by citizens' levels of political knowledge, exposure to political news, and interest in the war. Greater impact was associated with higher levels of knowledge and lower levels of exposure and interest. These findings challenge traditional views of these dimensions of political involvement and support a view derived from contemporary psychological theories of information processing.

scholarly journals Is Gender a Driver of Topic Choice? A Comparative Keyword Analysis of Political Cable News Interviews

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Mariasophia Falcone ◽  
Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Gun Control ◽  
Cable News ◽  
Political News ◽  
Social Nature ◽  
News Networks ◽  
And Gender ◽  
American Society ◽  
News Interviews

Cable news networks have become an increasingly important source of political news in the United States. They wield considerable influence on public opinion, particularly in relation to current issues involving social roles and gender dynamics. This study offers insights into how the choice of topic in political cable news interviews may be influenced by the gender of participants. A corpus of 40 political cable news interviews was compiled and analyzed on the basis of various combinations of male and female interviewers and interviewees. Corpus software was implemented to extract keywords that were then grouped to identify prominent topics according to gender. Topics discussed exclusively among male participants were more issue oriented (i.e., immigration, healthcare, the economy, and gun control) as compared to those discussed exclusively among female participants that were more in social nature (i.e., personal matters, the Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination, and tech giants in the context of social justice). Results showed that topics emerging from the female participants’ discourse were aligned with some widely held perceptions of women’s speech. At the same time, other features of the female participants’ speech appeared to be driven largely by their professional and institutional roles, and thus, not aligned with stereotypical perceptions. The findings have implications for the role of media and cable news in contemporary American society in avoiding the perpetration of gender-related topic bias.

Attention Centrality and Audience Fragmentation: An Approach for Bridging the Gap Between Selective Exposure and Audience Overlap

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Barnidge ◽  
Trevor Diehl ◽  
Lindsey A Sherrill ◽  
Jiehua Zhang
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
News Media ◽  
The United States ◽  
Selective Exposure ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Audience Fragmentation ◽  
Micro Level ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Level Analysis ◽  
Partisan News

Abstract Scholarship on audience fragmentation typically takes one of two approaches: The micro-level analysis of individuals’ selective exposure to partisan news, or the macro-level analysis of audience overlap. To bridge the gap between these levels of analysis, we introduce the concept of attention centrality as a set of macro-to-micro measures that characterize how individual news media selection is situated within networks of public attention. Relying on an online panel survey conducted in the United States (N = 1,493), we examine the relationship between three indicators of respondents’ attention centrality (closeness, betweenness, and reach) and the partisan valence of their news selections. The study finds different patterns of results for the three indicators of attention centrality, indicating that partisan news media are not uniformly isolated to the periphery of public attention. Results are discussed in light of conversations about selective exposure and audience overlap in the United States and around the world.

scholarly journals The effects of modality, English language proficiency, and length of stay on immigrants' learning from American news about politics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Yulia Medvedeva
Keyword(s):  
Length Of Stay ◽  
Language Proficiency ◽  
News Media ◽  
English Language ◽  
Television News ◽  
The United States ◽  
Symbol Systems ◽  
Political News ◽  
Print News ◽  
The U.S

This dissertation explored how well immigrants in the United States learn from American political news. Predictions in this online experiment were based on a 1990 survey in which Korean Americans with lower language proficiency and shorter length of stay in the U.S. demonstrated higher political knowledge scores when they reported relying on television news instead of print news. To test the findings of the 1990 study, news media were operationalized through modality as two symbol systems: words, which need to be learned to be understood, and pictures, which need to be recognized. One-hundred-forty-six individuals born in 52 countries completed the study in which each participant was exposed to one of the three conditions representing either television or radio or print news. Data demonstrated that immigrants with lower self-reported language proficiency correctly recognized more multiple-choice answers to questions about stories from television news in comparison to print news. This finding establishes a causal relationship between the presence of pictures in television's two-channel stream and better outcomes of memory about news for immigrants with weaker English language skills. Years of education in the U.S. emerged as the only reliable predictor of comprehension. Furthermore, in the television condition, immigrants with higher language proficiency correctly recognized about half-an-answer fewer than did immigrants with lower language proficiency. Findings suggest that television news is indeed beneficial for immigrants' learning about American politics, yet it becomes less beneficial once immigrants' competence increase.

scholarly journals A Window to the World: Americans' Exposure to Political News From Foreign Media Outlets

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Peterson ◽  
Emily Damm
Keyword(s):  
Political Communication ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Media Exposure ◽  
The United States ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Subject Analysis ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Political News ◽  
News Sources ◽  
Foreign Media

Political communication research overwhelmingly focuses on domestic media. Internet access has relaxed geographic constraints on news use to create an- other possibility: exposure to political coverage from foreign media outlets. We study the frequency and form of foreign media exposure in the United States using individual-level web browsing data and a content analysis of the news this sample encountered. This reveals foreign media exposure is widespread and internationally-oriented. 85% of these individuals visited a foreign source. Foreign media accounted for 7% of all news website visits. In a within-subject analysis of over three million visits to foreign and domestic websites, individuals were substantially more likely to encounter foreign affairs coverage, and less likely to reach coverage of U.S. domestic politics, when visiting foreign news sources. These findings show how new opportunities created by a changing media landscape shape public engagement with international politics.

Last Week Tonight With John Oliver and the Stewart/Colbert Impact on U.S. Political Communication in the Post-Network Era

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Alonso
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Scholarly Work ◽  
Political News ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
The Media

Chapter 2 analyzes Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (LWT), the political news satire show aired on HBO since 2014. While TDS satirized TV journalism’s coverage of news and TCR parodied the conservative rhetoric in the media, LWT presents investigations, generating in-depth coverage of national and international public interest issues. Chapter 2 analyzes LWT in relation to the academic debates and scholarly work generated by its successful predecessors. By contextualizing and examining the show in relation to the evolution of political infotainment in the United States, I show how LWT not only fills gaps left by mainstream media, but also takes satire to a more international, activist, and investigative level. Because U.S. political infotainment has been internationally influential, this chapter also serves to illuminate the debates about the genre to be applied to the Latin American cases, which have remained academically unexplored.

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