Media n Politics final exam review

What is the history and motivation for study of media effects?

• ‘Great scare’

  • Everyone is scared, brainwashed, etc

    • the desire to look into this

Minimal vs. not-so-minimal effects

• Minimal effects

  • Changed completely to the other side

• Not-so-minimal effects

  • Need more background in public opinon

Hypodermic needle model

• If you want to control the public, needle it in them; ‘Mid-1940s-WWII’

• Propaganda! The belief that the public will take it on face value 

• Assume a passive audience that accepts the message at face value 

Early studies of voting and schools of thought

(Columbia vs. Michigan)

Lazarsfeld et al. 1944; Berelson et al. 1954

• “A person thinks politically, as he is, socially. Social characteristics determine political preference.”

Psychological (Michigan)

• ‘American voter’ model (Campbell et al. 1960)

• Central role of partisanship

  • It is something more like you're socialized by family, childhood, background, on how they're going to vote

BOTH HAVE PANEL MODEL

• Both rely on two big ideas: why we see minimal effects

  • selective exposure and strong predisposition

Primary reasons why effects are difficult to uncover

The mass public is not a monolithic whole

• Acknowledging that the mass public is different is important

Therefore, two primary reasons why diffcult to uncover:

• Inadequate measures on many variables (Bartels: “Most notable embarrassments of social science”)

Reoccurring problems in media research

• Disconnect between scholarly work and practitioner beliefs 

  • The tension between them lowkey still occurs today 

• Keep forgetting politics is marginal for most

• Need to pay attention to types of effects• What is an effect? Is a small effect in reality a

  big deal?

  • Statistical vs. substantive significance

• Measurement

• Sources of news differ, as does the content!

Zaller’s opinion formation model

(RAS Model)

• need to be exposed to message (professor added this)

  • given exposure, need to receive message

    • depends on attention and cognitive ability

  • Just because a message is received, it doesn’t mean it is accepted

    • When asked questions, citizens sample immediately salient considerations

Zaller 1996. “The Myth Revised” in Mutz et al. Political Persuasion and Attitude

Change. What does it argue?

Media can strongly influence public opinion, but the effects depend on elite consensus and individual awareness.

Elite consensus vs. elite conflict is crucial

This is the biggest point in this chapter:

• When elites agree (consensus):
  → Media sends a one-sided message
  → Public opinion is strongly shaped and more uniform

• When elites disagree (conflict):
  → Media presents competing frames
  → Public opinion becomes divided and less predictable

So media influence depends on what political elites are saying, not just the media itself.

The non attitude—Converse  

• Flip-flopping  

  • Citizens flip-flop on their political opinion, especially as the general public does not focus on it, have less strong thoughts on it 

  • Inconsitented 

• Zaller is trying to explain it / help reduce the issue

Politically savvy individuals are more likely to…

be exposed and to receive more information

Political Novices are most likely to…

be influenced by media messages 

• Especially as they have fewer opinions and can more easily receive it and accept the message 

Politically moderate in a sophisticated area will fall under the

X

Zaller’s types of news events

Zaller’s theory of media influence

What has to happen for the media to influence citizens? (Zaller)

Measurement problems in assessing media influence

What was watched?

• How to measure exposure?

  • Laboratory experiments (internal validity)

  • Observational studies (external validity)

  • Quasi-experiments: A newspaper goes on strike, and we are removing that information from the general, so research decides to use that and compare it to citizens who did have a newspaper 

• Reception

  • Problems with self-report

  • Cognitive processing:

    • Memory vs. on-line models (Lodge et. al)

      • Online progress is taking it in and using that information and getting rid of it 

      • Memory take in the information and wait and use it with other infomraion to decide 

    • Example: manipulation issue guest member, we were going to hire someone; have to make a recall of information

    • Need- to -evaluate (Jarvis & Petty)   

Types of media effects and when/where we should expect to find them

Measuring content of news

• Easier for some media than others:

• Newspapers

• National network news

• Advertising

• Local television

• Social media feeds

Bartels 1993. “Messages Received: The Political Impact of Media Exposure.”American Political Science Review 87: 267-285.

Entman, Robert. 1989. “How the Media Affect What People Think: An Information Processing Approach.” Journal of Politics.

Agenda-setting,

• Mass media shapes over views of what is important on the national scene 

• “Mass media don’t tell us what to think, but what to think about.”

  • One of the reasons why authoritarian regimes try to flood the zone, if there are a lot of messages, people look at   

• Is it agenda -setting power srucnk? More fragmented 

  • ex: Fox News covers different types of news, 

    • The media is not the only one to set the agenda; peers and family  

Priming

• Altering the considerations people use to make decisions

  • Vote choice = economy, healthcare, education, war, and human rights  

• A prime is making a conceration more 

  • “Iyengar & Kinder- “by calling attention to some matters while ignoring others, television news influences the standard by which government, presidents, policies, and candidates for public office are judged.

• Assumes media emphasis increases accessibility

“If the news constantly focuses on the economy (inflation, jobs, gas prices), people are more likely to judge a president or candidate based mainly on economic performance—rather than healthcare, education, or human rights.”

Framing

Entman (1993) – “to frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described.”

• The frame is core to understanding an event–what the problem is, who is responsible for it, and who should be fixing it, and why 

ex: Framing Diabetes

• What you think about it will change if talking about children, fast food, obesity, who is responsible changes within the frame

one of the most important methods media effects/influence people’s thoughts One

Framing: episodic vs. thematic, equivalency, and issue

Iyengar episodic (portrait) vs. thematic (landscape) 

• thematic frames tend to pull back the view and show the strucures vs episodic where it frames the indivdual

  • Critical of having an episodic contextual framing—Can help diminish the structural issues 

    • One portrait focuses on one person

    • quantitative work could fall under episodic, but Iyengar draws attention to the fact that television news is more likely to focus on the episodic view, and he agrues that this could be dangerous, it is much more indiuval and less structural , its so and so fault but if we look at the thematic frame looks more the background and better understanding of the issue

• Landscape looking at that person with a background 

Framing: episodic vs. thematic, equivalency, and issue

Equivalency frames (Tversky & Kahneman):

• quantitative, mathematically equivalent, saying something like 90% surival rate or 10% death rate

  • People respond more to threats

• Emphasis or issue frames– Nelson, Clawson & Oxley example

  • the framing of on what the American public not/may agree on, protest/street marching of the KK

    • citizens respond differently if we are talking about freedom of speech vs public order (not equivalent frames, but will have very very different reactions)

unintentional exposure to politics vs intentional or selective exposure to politics

put as many media outlets on the spectrum

Intentionality of Exposure and Specific Media Goals

Adding the third dimension of intentionality,

Experiments (lab, field, quasi) & survey types: advantages/disadvantages and example of each

Soft vs. hard news – the audiences, and advantages and disadvantages of each

Soft news drama pulls people 1980s started, until the early 2000s political scientist largely ignored the

• political scientist (are the atteive people, so..) do not watch soft news as their primary source, USA Today, etc not being their primary source

  • may not have occurred to them that people use it as their primary method in getting news

“Sex, Lies, & War: How Soft News Brings Foreign Policy to the Inattentive Public” (Baum 2002)

Some issues easily packaged as compelling human dramas

• For the politically uninterested, incidental exposure

  • Capitalize on this human drama its good business

    • For the politically uninterested, unintentional exposure really matters; therefore, Baum argues that the public does not need to read the elite sources to get some political cues

What counts as “soft news”

techinally there is no actually d

Prior vs. Baum argument and evidence regarding soft news

Converse’s notion of non-attitudes and how Zaller’s theory partially explains them

Types of citizens and how/why media will affect people differently

General versus specific types of knowledge and the role of the message environment in each

Tactics and problems with measuring knowledge

Knowledge gap and differential effects of information on citizens

Advantages and disadvantages of different types of media and platforms

Prior’s argument about post-broadcast democracy

Role of intentionality/control and goal and how it shapes media effects

Coverage of polarization and how it matters

Digital media and how sorting may contribute to polarization

Post-social media information environments