scholarly journals The Effects of Dramatized Political News on Public Opinion

2005 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 321-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan S. Morris
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Side Effects ◽  
Laboratory Experiment ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
News Media ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Popular Method ◽  
Political News

Today’s American political news environment is more fragmented than ever before. In order to attract a larger audience, many political news reporters, editors, and producers work to create a product that is not only informative, but also entertaining and compelling. A popular method of achieving this goal is to dramatize news coverage of politics. While the goal of dramatizing the news is to entertain, previous research has discussed a number of possible side effects. Empirical evidence on this subject, however, is seriously lacking. Using a controlled laboratory experiment, this article analyzes the effect of dramatically embellished news on public opinion. The results indicate that, although entertaining for some, dramatically embellished political news has some negative effects on larger political attitudes, including overall support for political leaders and trust in the news media.

Media Malaise and the Decline of Legitimacy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Van Aelst
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Political Support ◽  
Level Of Education ◽  
Political News ◽  
Negative Tone ◽  
Election News ◽  
Over Time

This chapter analyzes media malaise theories and their consequences for legitimacy. These theories argue that the increasing availability of information through new and old media and increasingly negative tone of media are to blame for declining legitimacy. The chapter examines these claims by providing a systematic review of empirical research on media and political support. It first investigates whether news coverage has become more negative over time, and then examines the micro process that might explain the link between media coverage and political support. Empirical evidence suggests that where coverage has become more negative, this occurred before the 1990s and has levelled off since, and is concentrated primarily in election news. Negative political news does have a modest impact on political support once controlled for level of education, but that effect can be positive and negative, depending on the medium, the receiver, and the indicator of political support.

scholarly journals Public Opinion Polls and Experts in Election News

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 127
Author(s):  
Guðbjörg Hildur Kolbeins
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
News Media ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Online News ◽  
Parliamentary Election ◽  
Radio Stations ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Election News ◽  
Public Opinion Polls ◽  
Opinion Polls

By employing the theoretical framework of framing, the present paper attempts to examine the Icelandic media’s coverage of the 2013 parliamentary election by paying particular attention to coverage of public opinion polls and the policies of the political parties, i.e. the “horse-race” frame and the issue frame, and to examine media’s reliance on experts for interpretation of election news. Seven online news media, two newspapers, two radio stations and two television channels were monitored for 25 days prior to Election Day, i.e. from April 2 to April 26, 2013, - resulting in 1377 election news stories. The findings show, for example, that 29.8% of all the election news stories had public opinion polls as their primary angle while 12% of the stories were primarily issue-oriented. In addition, the media rely on experts for interpretation of the polls; five of the 10 most interviewed or quoted sources on public opinion surveys were political science experts who were affiliated with universities. Finally, news coverage of polls was generally amplified as media outlets had a tendency to report on public opinion polls that were commissioned by other media.

The Hostile Media Effect

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Feldman
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
News Media ◽  
Observational Studies ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Consumption Patterns ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Psychological Processes ◽  
Media Effect ◽  
Hostile Media Effect ◽  
Hostile Media

The “hostile media effect” occurs when opposing partisans perceive identical news coverage of a controversial issue as biased against their own side. This is a robust phenomenon, which has been empirically demonstrated in numerous experimental and observational studies across a variety of issue contexts and has been shown to have important consequences for democratic society. This chapter reviews the literature on the hostile media effect with an eye toward the theoretical explanations for it, its relationship to other psychological processes, and its broader implications for perceived public opinion, news consumption patterns, attitudes toward democratic institutions, and political discourse and participation. Particular attention is paid to how the hostile media phenomenon can help explain the public’s eroding trust in the news media and the recent polarization among news audiences. The chapter concludes with several suggestions for future research.

scholarly journals Guilty by Association: Using Word Embeddings to Measure Ethnic Stereotypes in News Coverage

2020 ◽  
pp. 107769902093230
Author(s):  
Anne C. Kroon ◽  
Damian Trilling ◽  
Tamara Raats
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
News Media ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Media Content ◽  
Word Embeddings ◽  
News Production ◽  
Ethnic Stereotypes ◽  
Production Processes ◽  
Stereotype Content ◽  
High Threat

The current study provides a new level of empirical evidence for the nature of ethnic stereotypes in news content by drawing on a sample of more than 3 million Dutch news items. The study’s findings demonstrate that universally accepted dimensions of stereotype content (i.e., low-status and high-threat attributes) can be replicated in news media content across a diverse set of ingroup and outgroup categories. Representations of minorities in newspapers have become progressively remote from factual integration outcomes, and are therefore rather an artifact of news production processes than a true reflection of what is actually happening in society.

The Hostile Media Effect

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Feldman
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
News Media ◽  
Observational Studies ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Consumption Patterns ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Psychological Processes ◽  
Media Effect ◽  
Hostile Media Effect ◽  
Hostile Media

The “hostile media effect” occurs when opposing partisans perceive identical news coverage of a controversial issue as biased against their own side. This is a robust phenomenon, which has been empirically demonstrated in numerous experimental and observational studies across a variety of issue contexts and has been shown to have important consequences for democratic society. This chapter reviews the literature on the hostile media effect with an eye toward the theoretical explanations for it, its relationship to other psychological processes, and its broader implications for perceived public opinion, news consumption patterns, attitudes toward democratic institutions, and political discourse and participation. Particular attention is paid to how the hostile media phenomenon can help explain the public’s eroding trust in the news media and the recent polarization among news audiences. The chapter concludes with several suggestions for future research.

What changed public opinion on the same-sex marriage issue? New implications of attribute measures and attribute priming in media agenda setting

2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 453-469 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Y. Chen ◽  
Paromita Pain
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
News Media ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Controversial Issues ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Same Sex Marriage ◽  
Attribute Salience ◽  
Attribute Priming

This study explores the attribute agenda-setting effects and attribute priming effects of news coverage on the issue of same-sex marriage. The affective attribute salience of news coverage on the same-sex marriage issue is stronger when related to public opinion than the substantive attribute salience of the news coverage. News coverage on the issue is strongly associated with audience attitudes about controversial issues. Last, on controversial issues, news media have long-term, rather than short-term, effects on public opinion.

The mediatisation of university governance: a theoretical and empirical exploration of some side-effects

2019 ◽  
pp. 123-144
Author(s):  
Andres Friedrichsmeier ◽  
Frank Marcinkowski
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Side Effects ◽  
News Media ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Knowledge Society ◽  
Information Value ◽  
University Governance ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
External Stakeholder

This paper analyses potential negative effects of mediatisation of university governance in Germany. Mediatisation reflects a change in expectations of how higher education institutions (HEI) should relate to the public. We explore two sets of developments that spawned this change of expectations. Firstly, the policy idea of a trend to a knowledge society affected what public contributions are expected of HEI. Secondly, reforms to decentralise HEI-governance compelled universities to orient themselves more directly towards demands of external stakeholder. Both developments reinforce each other, both are associated with extended needs for actor intermediation, and for consolidating means of orientation. Since performance figures and competition solely allow for a partial mapping of society's demands and needs, HEI and state administrators can be expected to make additional use of public discourse to evaluate comparatively a multitude of demands and expectations. This results in what we call a model of mediatised university governance. Since media discourse on higher education is strongly biased towards news values, this type of governance has potentially unintended side effects. In the second part of the paper, two empirical illustrations are discussed. First, the role of media attention in accidentally reinforcing a reputational mismatch of teaching and research is investigated. Secondly, we focus on an overstretching of the information value of media-effective rankings for decision making. The cases draw upon survey data, semi-standardised expert-interviews and content analysis of news media coverage.

scholarly journals API AND BEYOND: DETECTING COORDINATED BEHAVIOURS IN FACEBOOK INTERACTIONS AROUND POLITICAL NEWS STORIES

2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giglietto Fabio ◽  
Nicola Righetti ◽  
Giada Marino
Keyword(s):  
News Media ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Online News ◽  
General Election ◽  
The Political ◽  
Final Report ◽  
Political News ◽  
News Stories ◽  
The Social

This proposal is a follow-up of the project “Mapping Italian News Media Political Coverage in the Lead-up to 2018 General Election” (MINE). MINE aimed at creating a comprehensive map of the political news coverage created by the Italian online news media in the lead-up to 2018 general election. The final report of the project highlighted how the populist narrative dominated the news (both in terms of volume of coverage and Facebook engagement), and pinpointed the diverging patterns of Facebook interactions employed by different partisan communities to amplify the reach of the contents aligned with their worldview by sharing the news stories on social media, while trying to reframe, through comments, the negative coverage of the party they support. These insights led to further questions concerning the nature of the observed diverging patterns of Facebook interactions around political news. In particular, we wondered if the observed patterns were the result of a spontaneous grassroots effort or instead of a strategically organised attempt to manipulate the online news media landscape in order to game platforms algorithms in support of specific viewpoints, candidates and parties. Data originally collected for MINE during 2018 via publically available Facebook API proved useful to identify the patterns, but fall short of providing compelling evidence on the nature of these behaviours. In order to shed some light on this question, we thus requested and obtained access to two additional datasets directly provided by Facebook and made available through the Social Science One (SSO) initiative.

What’s New? Media, Public Opinion, and Democracy in the 21st Century

2019 ◽  
pp. 180-204
Author(s):  
Matt Guardino
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
New Media ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
21St Century ◽  
News Media ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Online Communication ◽  
Media Technology ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
Political Economic

This chapter contextualizes the book’s historical analyses within more recent media developments. It emphasizes the continuing relevance of the book’s analyses of news media and public opinion in the 21st-century technological environment. The chapter connects durable tendencies in corporate news to newer commercial and technological developments in online communication and social media. It explains how emerging forms and uses of media technology often provide new means of influence for corporate media and other centers of concentrated political-economic power. The chapter also presents an empirical analysis of neoliberal news coverage during the 2017 debate over repealing the Affordable Care Act. It ends by discussing possible media reforms that focus on institutional and systemic changes in U.S. political communication.

Toward a Critical Understanding of News Media, Public Opinion, and the Politics of Economic Inequality

2019 ◽  
pp. 9-49
Author(s):  
Matt Guardino
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
News Media ◽  
Economic Inequality ◽  
News Coverage ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Social Welfare Policy ◽  
Policy Debates ◽  
The Media ◽  
Critical Understanding ◽  
Material Power

This chapter sets the conceptual and historical context of the argument and describes patterns of U.S. public opinion that the book seeks to explain. It situates the book’s argument within scholarship on the politics of economic inequality, public opinion, news framing of policy debates, and the political economy of the media. The chapter also develops a new theory of media dynamics. This theory explains how corporate and governmental influences shaped by media policies filter news coverage of economic and social welfare policy issues. The chapter also summarizes the book’s contribution to empirical research on material power in American politics and to scholarship about the tensions between neoliberalism and democracy.

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