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The PFAD-HEC Model: Impacts of News Attributes and Use Motivations on Selective News Exposure
Abstract
This study examined effects of four common news attributes—personalization, fragmentation, authority–disorder bias, and dramatization (PFAD)—on news exposure and the moderating impacts of hedonic, epistemic, and civic news use motivations. In a lab experiment, participants browsed online news while selective exposure was unobtrusively logged. Findings yielded longer exposure to personalized and dramatized articles and news with low authority–disorder bias. Fragmentation had no significant impact. However, selective exposure to fragmented news was influenced by participants’ political understanding (epistemic motivation), exposure to personalization by news enjoyment (hedonic motivation), and exposure to authority–disorder bias by civic duty to keep informed (civic motivation). Results suggest that news styles may need to become more diversified to better address the informational needs of today’s fragmented audiences.
... Third, we distinguish between specific news items and follow previous research in exploring attentional content differences between devices (Dunaway & Soroka, 2019). Attention to news and what people learn from it is conditional on how the news is framed (e.g., Mothes, et al., 2019;Valkenburg et al., 1999) and different frames present different cognitive complexities for users (Shah et al., 2004). We test if an episodic vs. thematic news frame (Iyengar, 1990) is responsible for attentional differences and can explain different learning outcomes. ...
... Episodic posts would then "load the cognitive control system less strongly" (Fisher et al., 2018) than thematic political posts which, by definition (Iyengar, 1990), put events into context and provide indepth information that are often more complex. An episodic focus on political events is more attractive than news with a thematic focus, especially among those who feel knowledgeable about politics (Mothes et al., 2019). We extend the strand of research investigating attentional content differences between devices and ask: ...
... Since we used original news posts, they were not manipulated in terms of the frames they used. To ensure differences in frame perception by participants, in a posttest survey one week after the experiment, we asked on a scale from −5 (fully episodic) to +5 (fully thematic), whether "the social media post mainly focuses on a specific event/ instance OR rather aims to explain the context and background of an issue" (Mothes, et al., 2019). In line with our selection, participants perceived episodic posts as strongly focusing on specific events/instances (M = −2.17, ...
This study investigates whether knowledge gains from news post exposure are different when scrolling through a social media newsfeed on a smartphone compared to a desktop PC. While prior research has mostly focused on new platforms people receive news on (e.g., social media) for political learning, first indications exist that device modality (i.e. exposure on smartphone vs. desktop PC) itself alters news exposure patterns. With the help of mobile eye-tracking, this study investigates cognitive processes that enable learning from exposure among a student sample (n = 122). We extend prior research on the mediating role of attention for learning by investigating whether different frames of political news posts can attenuate this indirect relationship. The study uses a 2 × 2 mixed-subjects design, with the device being a between-subjects condition and news frames (episodic vs thematic) being a within-subjects condition. We find smaller knowledge gains from smartphone news exposure, which cannot be explained by differences in visual attention.
... 3 Finally, we expect the news factor of continuity to especially pertain to quality news media. This news factor refers to a journalistic style that stands opposite to fragmented or incident-based reporting that lacks context and/or interpretation (see Mothes et al., 2019). Continuity instead refers to a form of journalism in which topics are covered in greater depth by journalists who have the time to specialize in an issue and give interpretation. ...
... Earlier coverage will cause audience awareness of a topic, and readers may expect the quality outlets to provide more prominent coverage of this topic to further expand their knowledge (Eilders, 2006). This is not to say that those popular outlets do not provide any continuity; actually, Mothes et al. (2019) find that non-fragmented news is particularly attractive to readers with lower internal efficacy. We rather contend that the resources and incentives that those outlets have to produce follow-up coverage are more limited and therefore prioritize covering the 'breaking news' of the day. ...
... Personified content offers closeness to as well as identification with the reader and is more easily comprehensible for audiences with low news interest. Hence, it may especially appeal to the audience typical of popular news (Mothes et al., 2019), thus incentivizing popular news media to include citizens' private experiences by reporting events with a personalized viewpoint (Skovsgaard, 2014). Again, this is in comparative perspective -also quality newspapers will have those incentives, but arguably to a lesser degree. ...
The presence of news factors in journalistic products has been abundantly researched, but investigations into their actual impact on the news production process are scarce. This study provides a large-scale analysis of why news factors matter: Whether, how, and which news factors affect the prominence of news items and does this differ per outlet type? A manual content analysis of print, online, and television news demonstrates that a larger total number of news factors in a story positively predict an item’s length and likelihood of front-page publication or likelihood of being a newscast’s opening item. News factors ‘conflict’ and ‘eliteness’ have the strongest impact, mixed evidence was found for ‘proximity’ and ‘personification’, whereas relationships with ‘negativity’, ‘influence and relevance’, and ‘continuity’ were mostly insignificant. Fewer differences than expected emerged between outlet types (popular vs quality press). Especially for television news, outlet type (public vs commercial broadcaster) hardly mattered.
... Zusätzlich zeichnet sich der Crowdfunding-basierte Journalismus aber auch mehrheitlich durch Merkmale aus, die in zunehmend fragmentierten Informationsumgebungen und komplexen Gesellschaftszusammenhängen besonders dazu geeignet sind, Orientierung zu bieten (Cha, 2020;Harbers, 2016). Hierzu zählt einerseits eine erhöhte Einordnungsleistung, wie wir sie etwa im ‚slow journalism' sehen: Diese geht über die Vermittlung von Ereigniswissen hinaus und betrachtet das politische und gesellschaftliche Geschehen vorrangig in seinen heute oftmals hochkomplexen Zusammenhängen, damit es Nutzer:innen möglich wird, Einzelereignisse sinnvoll nachvollziehen und kontextualisieren zu können (Mendes & Marinho, 2022;Mothes et al., 2019). Mit einer erhöhten Orientierungsleistung ebenfalls verbunden ist der im Crowdfunding-Journalismus zu verzeichnende Trend hin zu stärkerer Lösungsorientierung, der sich insbesondere im ‚constructive journalism' und ‚solutions journalism' zeigt: Hierbei wird der die Berichterstattung oft dominierenden Dramatisierung, Problemfokussierung und Konflikthaltigkeit (Bennett, 2015;Reinemann et al., 2012;Sjøvaag, 2015) eine Diskussion um mögliche Lösungen und Handlungsansätze entgegengestellt; statt den Fokus auf die Unterschiede in den Ansichten von Konfliktparteien in den Fokus zu rücken, werden die Gemeinsamkeiten betrachtet (z. ...
... Mit einer erhöhten Orientierungsleistung ebenfalls verbunden ist der im Crowdfunding-Journalismus zu verzeichnende Trend hin zu stärkerer Lösungsorientierung, der sich insbesondere im ‚constructive journalism' und ‚solutions journalism' zeigt: Hierbei wird der die Berichterstattung oft dominierenden Dramatisierung, Problemfokussierung und Konflikthaltigkeit (Bennett, 2015;Reinemann et al., 2012;Sjøvaag, 2015) eine Diskussion um mögliche Lösungen und Handlungsansätze entgegengestellt; statt den Fokus auf die Unterschiede in den Ansichten von Konfliktparteien in den Fokus zu rücken, werden die Gemeinsamkeiten betrachtet (z. B. Mast et al., 2019;Mothes et al., 2019;Stifterverein Medienqualität Schweiz, 2020). ...
... MOTIVES FOR READING COVID-19 NEWS Oliver et al., 2012;Oschatz et al., 2021), manipulated motivationally relevant aspects of news (e.g., Grizzard et al., 2017;Knobloch-Westerwick et al., 2005), or measured motivations to engage with news in general (e.g., Hoffner et al., 2009;Mothes et al., 2019; see Knobloch-Westerwick et al., 2020, for an overview). The present study will focus on the expectations that people have about the impact of reading unique negative news items in order to examine how these motives predict choice behavior. ...
... For example, some people may find it morally inappropriate to engage with negative content, resulting in avoidance. By contrast, other people may explore news that details human suffering from a sense of moral duty, for example, because they feel it is in line with their moral values to do so (Zaki, 2014; see Mothes et al., 2019, for a similar point about civic duty). ...
People were confronted with a barrage of negative news during the COVID-19 crisis. This study investigated how anticipated psychological impact predicted decisions to read personalized and factual COVID-19 news. First, participants chose, based on headlines, whether they wanted to read news articles (or not). Then, all headlines were rated on a set of motivational dimensions. In order to test confirmatory hypotheses, the data were divided into an exploration (n = 398) and validation data set (n = 399). Using multilevel modeling, we found robust support for four preregistered hypotheses: Choice for negative COVID-19 news was positively predicted by (a) personal versus factual news; (b) the anticipated amount of knowledge acquisition; (c) the anticipated relevance to one’s own personal situation; and (d) participant’s sense of moral duty. Moreover, exploratory findings suggested a positive relationship between headline choice and anticipated compassion, a negative relationship with anticipated inappropriateness and gratitude, and a quadratic relationship with anticipated strength of feelings. These results support the idea that negative content offers informational value, both in terms of understanding negative events and in terms of preparing for these events. Furthermore, engagement with negative content can be motivated by moral values.
... Regarding journalistic news exposure, the analyses yielded no effect of content type, but interestingly, a negative effect of political interest on exposure time (Table 4, Model 11). That is, higher political interest predicted shorter exposure, which may potentially indicate the monitorial nature of information acquisition especially among politically interested citizens (Mothes, Knobloch-Westerwick, and Pearson 2019). However, no interaction between political interest and content type was found (Table 4, Model 12). ...
... Second, politically interested citizens may primarily benefit from news being increasingly available on social media on a more superficial information level, that is, through exposure to headlines, teasers, or pictures. This corroborates earlier research by Mothes, Knobloch-Westerwick, and Pearson (2019) showing that users with higher perceived political understanding preferred fragmented, eventfocused news over more detailed, background-oriented political content. If politically interested users do not click on journalistic posts or expose themselves to journalistic articles more frequently than politically uninterested users, journalistic news may indeed lose the competition for attention against other, more hedonic contents on social media. ...
On social media, journalistic news products compete with entertainment-oriented and user-generated contents on two different stages of news use: First, users navigate their attention through a continuous stream of information in their newsfeed and, second, they potentially click on some of these posts to spend time with the actual full-contents. The present study conceptualizes these two types of news use behaviors in social media environments as first- and second-level selective exposure. Based on this new approach, we investigated main drivers of journalistic news exposure on both exposure levels in an online survey experiment before the German federal election in 2017 (N = 210). To achieve high ecological validity, we developed a Newsfeed Exposure Observer (NEO)-Framework to recreate realistic user settings for online experiments studying selective exposure in the digital era, where news posts are complemented by popularity cues like social endorsements or individual recommendations. Findings show that, at the first level of selective exposure, attention to journalistic news posts is particularly affected by political interest. However, the decision to click on posts in the newsfeed and to spend time with the linked contents seems more strongly driven by social factors than by individual predispositions.
... This trend may point to a broader cultural shift towards a more nuanced understanding of journalism's role in society, where rigid conventions give way to a more flexible approach that is responsive to the changing informational needs and expectations of the public (e. g., Mast, Coesemans, and Temmerman 2019;Mothes, Knobloch-Westerwick, and Pearson 2019). ...
... In times of increasing market competition and simultaneously growing "affective polarization" and "moral indignation" in societal debates (Hwang et al., 2018;Wagner, 2021), both roles additionally appear to become increasingly interwoven, in that such roles address important emotional needs of news audiences and thereby simultaneously fulfill important functions for media organizations to ensure economic viability. While "infotainment" is often used to emotionally engage less news-interested users (Mothes et al., 2019;Otto et al., 2016), "interventionism" addresses the increasing number of users who are affectively involved in societal debates and particularly appreciate the news that supports their own-or their ingroup's-points of view (Edgerly & Vraga, 2019;Wojcieszak & Garrett, 2018). As economic analyses show (Gentzkow & Shapiro, 2010;Merkley, 2018), media companies are therefore increasingly inclined to accommodate user preferences not only by providing entertainment but also by expressing opinions for commercial reasons. ...
This study examines the perceived relevance and implementation of competing normative ideals in journalism in times of increasing use of digital technology in newsrooms. Based on survey and content analysis data from 37 countries, we found a small positive relationship between the use of digital research tools and “watchdog” performance. However, a stronger and negative relationship emerged between the use of digital audience analytics and the performance of “watchdog” and “civic” roles, leading to an overall increase in conception–performance gaps on both roles. Moreover, journalists’ use of digital community tools was more strongly and positively associated with “infotainment” and “interventionism.”
... We tested our hypotheses with binary logistic regressions (for clicking) and tobit regressions (for duration). Tobit models are appropriate when there is left or right censoring in the distribution of the outcome variable (Long, 1997), and this was the case for all our duration variables, which were zero-inflated (see also Mothes et al., 2019). Our regression models included a range of covariates that have been shown to associate with (or that theoretically could predict) news exposure, including demographics (e.g., Gil de Zúñiga et al., 2017), political orientation and political knowledge (e.g., Feldman et al., 2018;Haim et al., 2021), efficacy perceptions, general news use (e.g., Knobloch-Westerwick & Meng, 2009), and news trust (e.g., Strömbäck et al., 2020). ...
Individuals harboring perceptions that the “news will find me” (NFM) tend to be less active consuming traditional media, preferring news online and on social media. NFM has also been linked with lower political knowledge and political participation over time. What remains to be seen, however, is whether high-NFM individuals are in fact less likely to expose themselves to news once they do encounter it online. This preregistered study fills this gap in the literature by unobtrusively logging selection behaviors while U.S. adults browsed a mock news website featuring various hard and soft news stories. Consistent with our hypothesizing, NFM was associated with greater exposure to soft news. Additionally, we examined whether genre-specific NFM beliefs would predict less exposure to those news genres. We found support for this hypothesis in the context of science news, but for political news, this relationship depended on the news stories presented.
... However, our data is still based on selfreports and can thus not rule out social desirability inaccuracies (e.g., Slater, 2004). Future research should test the relationship between news exposure and learning on an empirical basis less susceptible to perceptual distortion (e.g., Karnowski, Kümpel, Leonhard, & Leiner, 2017;Mothes, Knobloch-Westerwick, & Pearson 2019) and/or on a more finegrained level of analysis, for example using media diary studies, data donations, or tracking data (Ohme et al., 2023;Araujo et al., 2022;Mangold, Stier, Breuer, & Scharkow 2021). Second, assessing the level of political knowledge is a tricky task (Barabas, Jerit, Pollock, & Rainey, 2014). ...
The increasing prevalence of news snacking – that is, the brief, intermittent attendance to news in mainly digital and mobile media contexts – has been discussed as a problematic behavior potentially leading to a less informed public. Empirical research, however, that investigates the relationship between news snacking and political knowledge is sparse. Against the background of changed opportunity structures in increasingly digital and mobile media environments, this study investigates how news snacking relates to the breadth and depth of political knowledge in society. Based on an online survey of the German population (N = 558), we examine how snacking news affects political event and background knowledge gains using different digital news platforms. Results show that users who exhibit high levels of news snacking learn substantially less from news use across different types of digital platforms.
... In a cluttered advertising environment, personalization could be a powerful solute, as the notion of selective exposure theory suggests that consumers pay greater attention to personally relevant messages (e.g. Dylko, 2015;Moths et al., 2019;O'Keffee, 2002). A personalized ad offers benefits for both consumers and marketers, and it can facilitate consumers' information searching process by providing relevant information that expedites their decision-making. ...
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to figure out the factors (i.e. ad type and ad personalization) that diminish the detrimental advertising clutter effects in terms of ad attention and ad clicks.
Design/methodology/approach
To fulfill the purpose, an eye-tracking study using real-time Facebook accounts of the participants was conducted.
Findings
The findings suggest that not all types of ad format face attentional competition. Consumers have a tendency to selectively care of native advertising area, where clutter becomes a significant issue. Additionally, personalized advertising is beneficial for attracting consumer attention regardless of the clutter level.
Originality/value
This less-artificial study setting with an eye-tracker makes up for the findings from previous ad clutter studies based on self-reported data; this study was able to observe real-life interaction between consumers and social media. The personalized native format may benefit advertisers in grabbing more attention. However, the careful use of native ads is recommended, because excessive ads could increase the attentional competition among native ads.
... The available research mainly refers to this development as an increasing soft news orientation of journalistic media, resulting in more entertaining, dramatized, and sensationalistic news content to appeal to an oversaturated audience (for an overview, see Reinemann, Stanyer, Scherr, & Legnante, 2011). This strategy appears to succeed, at least in the short term and for some audience segments (Bas & Grabe, 2015;Mothes, Knobloch-Westerwick, & Pearson, 2019). However, comparative content analyses suggest that this trend in news coverage strongly depends on the audience orientation of news outlets, with commercial television channels and tabloid newspapers showing a significantly higher increase over time and higher overall share of soft news than public-service television channels and elite newspapers (e.g., Curran, Salovaara-Moring, Cohen, & Iyengar, 2010;McLachlan & Golding, 2000). ...
Journalistic practice has changed fundamentally in today’s high-choice digital media environments. This is especially true for newspaper journalism, which is suffering from declining circulation and decreasing advertising revenue. The question of how journalism will prevail under such circumstances is closely intertwined with the question of how newspaper organizations handle these challenges. Although changes in news organizations are evident, the present chapter aims to clarify whether and how these organizational changes translate into journalistic practice. Findings suggest that both business principles and journalistic principles applied in news organizations influence role performance, confirming an often discussed paradoxical situation in journalism: While some organizational factors curtail journalistic independence by facilitating external influence, others strengthen journalistic independence by countering external influences. For the future of newspaper journalism, it will be crucial to observe how this ‘balance of power’ will be decided and which factors cause potential shifts in these power relations—factors that most likely lie beyond the organizational level in the broader societal context.
... The available research mainly refers to this development as an increasing soft news orientation of journalistic media, resulting in more entertaining, dramatized, and sensationalistic news content to appeal to an oversaturated audience (for an overview, see Reinemann, Stanyer, Scherr, & Legnante, 2011). This strategy appears to succeed, at least in the short term and for some audience segments (Bas & Grabe, 2015;Mothes, Knobloch-Westerwick, & Pearson, 2019). However, comparative content analyses suggest that this trend in news coverage strongly depends on the audience orientation of news outlets, with commercial television channels and tabloid newspapers showing a significantly higher increase over time and higher overall share of soft news than public-service television channels and elite newspapers (e.g., Curran, Salovaara-Moring, Cohen, & Iyengar, 2010;McLachlan & Golding, 2000). ...
... We define content as the qualitative characteristics of a news story that distinguishes it from other types of media content. We draw on research that has defined news and differentiated it from other content and explores the effects of news attributes on audience behaviors and perceptions (Armstrong et al., 2015;Gans, 1979;Mothes, Knobloch-Westerwick, & Pearson, 2019;Shoemaker & Cohen, 2006). We propose that knowledge of news content includes recognizing news values, understanding dominant ways in which news is often presented, such as episodic or thematic frames, and recognizing key features of news, such as use of sources and evidence of verification (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2011). ...
Despite renewed interest in news literacy (NL) as a way to combat mis- and dis-information, existing scholarship is plagued by insufficient theory building and inadequate conceptualization of both “NL” and its application. We address this concern by offering a concise definition of NL and suggest five key knowledge and skill domains that comprise this literacy. We distinguish NL from its application to behaviors that communication scholars have been interested in, including news exposure, verification, and identifying misinformation. We propose an adapted Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to include NL in addition to the existing components (attitudes towards the behavior, social norms, perceived behavioral control) when modeling NL Behaviors. We discuss how this model can unite scholars across subfields and propose a research agenda for moving scholarship forward.
Selective reading of political online information was examined based on cognitive dissonance, social identity, and news values frameworks. Online reports were displayed to 156 Americans while selective exposure was tracked. The news articles that participants chose from were either conservative or liberal and also either positive or negative regarding American political policies. In addition, information processing styles (cognitive reflection and need-for-cognition) were measured. Results revealed confirmation and negativity biases, per cognitive dissonance and news values, but did not corroborate the hypothesis derived from social identity theory. Greater cognitive reflection, greater need-for-cognition, and worse affective state fostered the confirmation bias; stronger social comparison tendency reduced the negativity bias.
The deceptively simple question “What is news?” remains pertinent even as we ponder the future of journalism in the digital age. This article examines news values within mainstream journalism and considers the extent to which news values may be changing since earlier landmark studies were undertaken. Its starting point is Harcup and O’Neill’s widely-cited 2001 updating of Galtung and Ruge’s influential 1965 taxonomy of news values. Just as that study put Galtung and Ruge’s criteria to the test with an empirical content analysis of published news, this new study explores the extent to which Harcup and O’Neill’s revised list of news values remain relevant given the challenges (and opportunities) faced by journalism today, including the emergence of social media. A review of recent literature contextualises the findings of a fresh content analysis of news values within a range of UK media 15 years on from the last study. The article concludes by suggesting a revised and updated set of contemporary news values, whilst acknowledging that no taxonomy can ever explain everything.
Posting comments on the news is one of the most popular forms of user participation in online newspapers, and there is great potential for public discourse that is associated with this form of user communication. However, this potential arises only when several users participate in commenting and when their communication becomes interactive. Based on an adaption of Galtung and Ruge’s theory of newsworthiness, we hypothesized that a news article’s news factors affect both participation levels and interactivity in a news item’s comments section. The data from an online content analysis of political news are consistent with the hypotheses. This article explores the ways in which news factors affect participation levels and interactivity, and it discusses the theoretical, normative, and practical implications of those findings.
Before the 2013 German federal election, 121 participants completed a 2-session online study (which paralleled a U.S. study before the 2012 presidential election). They browsed online search results pertaining to 4 political issues while selective exposure was unobtrusively measured. In a 4 × 2 × 2 (topic × issue stance × source credibility) within-subjects design, the search results indicated either issue support or opposition, associated with low- or high-credibility sources. Hypotheses were derived from cognitive dissonance, approach-avoidance, and motivated cognition models. Findings yielded a confirmation bias. Attitude-consistent exposure uniformly reinforced attitudes; attitude-discrepant exposure uniformly weakened attitudes. Analyses with parallel U.S. data showed a stronger confirmation bias in the United States than in Germany.
The greatest obstacle for health campaigns is most likely a lack of adequate exposure (Hornik, 2002), as public health messages compete with a flood of alternative messages. In light of America’s obesity epidemic, the present work examines message characteristics that may foster exposure to recommendations on healthful weight management. Drawing on social cognitive theory and exemplification theory, the present three-session 2×2 experiment examined impacts of efficacy and exemplification, as characteristics of an online weight-loss message, on selective exposure and change in recommended behavior. Exposure depended on both characteristics, as the exemplar, high-efficacy version resulted in longest and the base-rate, high-efficacy version in shortest exposure, while both low-efficacy versions fell in between. Change in recommended behavior was positive and significantly higher in exemplar message groups than for base-rate version groups, where the change was negative.
This article explores how the changing nature of journalistic work and organization are affecting the profession, the way it is perceived by personnel, the roles played by journalists, and autonomy of journalists. It finds that the technical and economic changes are disrupting the established professional status, roles, and practices of journalists, removing professional control that previously existed.
Emotion is often treated as unconducive to rationality and informed citizenship. For this reason, journalistic styles that personalize issues and elicit emotion are typically not taken seriously as information sources. The experimental study reported here tested these sentiments through the knowledge gap hypothesis. Eight investigative news stories, arguably important to informed citizenship (e.g., child labor, corruption in public housing administration, lethality of legal drugs), were each presented in two versions. One featured emotional testimony of ordinary people who experienced the issue, and the other did not—resembling the traditional view of news as cold hard facts. Emotional versions were associated with smaller knowledge gaps between higher and lower education groups. Moreover, the size of knowledge gaps varied across three memory measures: free recall, cued recall, and recognition. Contrary to the inimical role that is traditionally assigned to emotion, these findings suggest a facilitative role for emotion in informing citizens.
A frequent critique of contemporary journalism is that journalists rarely adjudicate factual disputes when covering politics; however, very little research has been done on the effects of such passive journalism on audiences. This study tests effects of active adjudication versus “he said/she said” journalism on a variety of outcomes, finding that adjudication can correct factual beliefs, increase perceived news quality, satisfy perceived informational needs, and increase the likelihood of future news use. However, for readers who were less interested in the issues under dispute, adjudication also reduced epistemic political efficacy, which is confidence in one's ability to find the truth in politics.
Political efficacy has been studied extensively since the 1950s, but analysts have never been fully satisfied with its measurement. After considerable testing, four new questions tapping internal political efficacy were added to the 1988 National Election Study. Our investigation shows that inter-item correlations among these questions indicate high internal consistency, that by both exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis the items measure a single concept distinct from external efficacy and political trust, that the measurement model is robust across major subgroups, and that the overall scale is externally valid and provides a good distribution of efficacy scores across the population. Further, the results of an order experiment in the survey suggest that responses are unaffected by mode of presentation. In short, the four new questions constitute the most satisfactory measure of internal political efficacy to date.
This study, based on a content analysis of television news and survey in eleven nations, explores the split between those who see the media as politically alienating and others who see the media as encouraging greater political involvement. Here, we suggest that both positions are partly right. On the one hand, television news, and in particular public service television news, can be very effective in imparting information about public affairs and promoting a culture of democracy in which news exposure, public affairs knowledge, sense of democratic competence and political interest feed off each other. On the other hand, the views represented in public affairs news are overwhelmingly those of men and elites, which can discourage identification with public life.
The possibly detrimental consequences of soft news are subject of popular and academic debate. This study investigates how watching particular news genres—soft versus hard—relates to cynicism about politics among Dutch citizens. A nuanced and novel scale measuring relative exposure to soft versus hard news is introduced using nonparametric unidimensional unfolding. The analysis of three public opinion surveys demonstrates a strong relationship between people’s position on this hard versus soft news exposure scale and political cynicism. People who watched relatively more soft news were more cynical about politics than people who watched relatively more hard news. This relationship was not conditional on individuals’ level of political knowledge and interest.
Data from a national Australian survey provide little evidence of a significant effect for the taste for soft news on news attachment among the general public as well as the six common sex-by-age targeted market segments of the news industry. This contradicts recent arguments that soft news is necessary to democratic life because, in an age of media proliferation and audience fragmentation, it keeps attention-scarce people with the news.
This study conducted a cross-national television news content analysis in 14 countries to compare the elements of sensationalism appearing in four types of media systems. A secondary analysis was further employed to examine the relationship between news sensationalization, news competition levels, and professionalism of these countries. Results reveal that crime-, accident-, and disaster-related news remain the staples of sensational news across countries. Dual broadcasting systems devoted more sensational news coverage than commercial broadcasting systems. Sensational formal features were found to be limited in all broadcasting systems. Celebrities and ordinary people tended to pose as news actors to personalize and dramatize the news more frequently than allowing officials or authoritative sources to legitimate the stories. Furthermore, news competition has been confirmed as an impact to the boom of news sensationalization. More professional journalists report more soft news than less professional ones.
In an information-rich environment with ample choice, do citizens still get exposed to what is going on around them in society? Or do they become ‘information hermits’, only interested in their personal hobbies? In contrast to widespread fears, the results of a large-scale survey, representative for the population of the Netherlands, suggest that most citizens still get an overview of what is going on in the world, and that television news is still the most popular source for that information. In addition, news on the Internet reaches those who are unlikely to seek news offline and wish to be entertained instead of informed. In detail, the study examines (1) which factors influence total news-overview avoidance, but also (2) what determines the amount of news exposure for those who do not skip the news.
This study investigates the appeal of sensationalist television news. News stories were content analyzed to measure the presence of sensationalist features. In addition, the stories were watched and evaluated by participants to measure the degree to which the items elicited emotional arousal and the degree to which the items were liked. As predicted, the findings showed that emotional arousal mediates effects of sensationalist features on liking and that the relationship between emotional arousal and liking takes the shape of an inverted U.
The concept of negativity in political news has not reached the status of a homogenous, overarching theoretical concept. This article proposes conceptual understandings, categorizations and practical operationalizations of negativity in the news that reflect the consensus of existing work paying special attention to recent European research. This work aims to systematize existing concepts and categories in order to increase comparability and cumulativity of empirical evidence. To structure and standardize dimensions of negativity in the news we differentiate firstly between negativity and confrontation, secondly between frame-related negativity and individual actor-related negativity, and thirdly between non-directional and directional dimensions of negativity.
This article provides a common set of indicators and matrice-based classifications of negativity (and its antithesis) in the news to measure and categorize its intensity and multi-dimensionality.
Common people that are apparently randomly selected by journalists to illustrate a news story (popular exemplars) have a substantial effect on what the audience think about the issue. This effect may be partly due to the mere fact that popular exemplars attract attention and act as attention commanders just like many other speaking sources in the news. Yet, popular exemplars’ effects extend well beyond that of other talking sources. Due to their similarity, trustworthiness, and the vividness of their account, popular exemplars have significantly more impact than experts that are being interviewed or, in particular, than politicians that are quoted in the news. We show this drawing on an internet-based experiment that uses fake television news items as stimuli and that systematically compares the effect of these talking sources in the news. We also find that taking into account preexisting attitudes changes the findings substantially. The effects are more robust and yield a more nuanced picture of what type of exemplars have what kind of effect on what type of public.
Personalization has become a central concept in discussions on how political news, and election coverage in particular, has changed over time. The general belief is that the focus of news coverage has shifted from parties and organizations to candidates and leaders. However, the evidence is far from conclusive. This is due in no small part to a lack of conceptual clarity and an absence of common operationalizations which are a major cause of the unclear or conflicting conclusions about the personalization of political news. This article seeks to remedy this shortcoming. It presents a model for comprehending the personalization of political news based on a review of relevant studies. The article makes a series of recommendations for how the concept might be operationalized for an analysis of media content in order to enable cross-nationally comparative research.
An experimental design, theoretically motivated by cognitive models of text comprehension, investigates effects of structures in complex news on readers (undergraduate non-science majors) who have little or no expertise for the content (science and technology). Text from two New York Times stories were modified for a proposed explanatory structure building (ESB) model to enhance reader interest in and comprehension of the content. Dependent variables include self-reported situational interest and a deeper situational understanding of the text as measured by sorting tasks and inference generating questions. A between-subjects field experiment exposed participants (N = 235) to text on a Web page in either the traditional inverted pyramid or ESB structure. As predicted, when controlling for pretest levels of scientific literacy, the ESB news text significantly enhanced reader interest and understanding of the content, as compared to the original inverted pyramid news stories. Results are interpreted in the context of enhancing the public understanding of complex news issues.
An Internet newsmagazine was created to ascertain effects of three dimensions of news salience—magnitude, likelihood, and immediacy of events—on selective news exposure. In an overview, leads of half the articles were manipulated along the salience dimensions (low vs. high). Remaining leads and all articles were held constant. While readers sampled articles, their selective exposure was automatically recorded. Independent manipulation of salience dimensions resulted in increased exposure to associated articles for all three dimensions. Their joint manipulation yielded the same results for magnitude and likelihood. The absence of interactions in the joint manipulation suggests additive dimension effects.
This study investigated emotion as a potential explanation for the omnipresent gender gap in political knowledge. Past studies have examined methodological issues, socioeconomic attributes, and media use as possible contributors, but have not included enjoyment of media use as a factor in the relation between gender and political knowledge. Using 2007 data from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, it was found that, in line with uses and gratifications theory, enjoyment did indeed play a role in the acquisition of political information, and increased enjoyment resulted in higher political knowledge. This relation was stronger for women than for men.
Guided by field theory and the concept of journalistic boundary work, this study seeks to examine whether BuzzFeed, a new agent in the journalistic field, is participating in the preservation or transformation of the journalistic field. This is carried out by comparing its news outputs with those of The New York Times based on the markers – or boundaries – that defined traditional journalistic practice, particularly news values, topics, sources, formats, and norms. The analysis found that while news articles produced by BuzzFeed are exhibiting some departures from traditional journalistic practice, in general, BuzzFeed is playing by the rules, which might explain its legitimation as a recognized agent in the field.
This experiment tested four storytelling reading methods for young adults. Techniques such as text chunking, adding local datelines and why-you-should-care boxes improved reading experiences. The addition of recent context, background and definitions also raised recall scores.
Mediated messages flood our daily lives, through virtually endless choices of media channels, genres, and content. However, selectivity determines what media messages we attend to and focus on. The present book examines the factors that influence this selectivity. Seminal books on selective media exposure were published in 1960 by Klapper and in 1985 by Zillmann and Bryant. But an integrated update on this research field is much needed, as rigorous selective exposure research has flourished in the new millennium. In the contexts of political communication, health communication, Internet use, entertainment consumption, and electronic games, the crucial question of how individuals choose what content they consume has garnered much attention. The present book integrates theories and empirical evidence from these domains and discusses the related research methodologies. In light of the ever-increasing abundance of media channels and messages, selective exposure has become more important than ever for media impacts. This monograph provides a comprehensive review of the research on selective exposure to media messages, which is at the heart of communication science and media effects. It is required reading for media scholars and researchers, and promises to influence and inspire future research.
Explosive growth in the number of options prompts media researchers to consider how selection behavior changes under higher choice conditions. Two experiments demonstrate that choice environments offering options in smaller sets lead users to be more likely to select news content, in particular “hard news” content. A third study incorporates theories of information processing to explain the observed effects of choice environment. The study provides evidence that smaller sets of options lead users to compare the merits of each option, whereas larger sets of options prompt users to quickly scan the environment for an acceptable option.
The media environment is changing. Today in the United States, the average viewer can choose from hundreds of channels, including several twenty-four hour news channels. News is on cell phones, on iPods, and online; it has become a ubiquitous and unavoidable reality in modern society. The purpose of this book is to examine systematically, how these differences in access and form of media affect political behaviour. Using experiments and new survey data, it shows how changes in the media environment reverberate through the political system, affecting news exposure, political learning, turnout, and voting behavior.
The American public has consistently declared itself less concerned with foreign affairs in the post-Cold War era, even after 9/11, than at any time since World War II. How can it be, then, that public attentiveness to U.S. foreign policy crises has increased? This book represents the first systematic attempt to explain this apparent paradox. Matthew Baum argues that the answer lies in changes to television's presentation of political information. In so doing he develops a compelling "byproduct" theory of information consumption. The information revolution has fundamentally changed the way the mass media, especially television, covers foreign policy. Traditional news has been repackaged into numerous entertainment-oriented news programs and talk shows. By transforming political issues involving scandal or violence (especially attacks against America) into entertainment, the "soft news" media have actually captured more viewers who will now follow news about foreign crises, due to its entertainment value, even if they remain uninterested in foreign policy. Baum rigorously tests his theory through content analyses of traditional and soft news media coverage of various post-WWII U.S. foreign crises and statistical analyses of public opinion surveys. The results hold key implications for the future of American politics and foreign policy. For instance, watching soft news reinforces isolationism among many inattentive Americans. Scholars, political analysts, and even politicians have tended to ignore the soft news media and politically disengaged citizens. But, as this well-written book cogently demonstrates, soft news viewers represent a largely untapped reservoir of unusually persuadable voters.
This study examined the joint effect of message and personality attributes on online news sharing. In two experiments (N = 270, N = 275), readers indicated their likelihood to share news representing two content domains and three informational utility dimensions. A moderated mediation path analysis was used. On average, news consumers shared news containing informational utility. Opinion leaders shared news irrespective of informational utility because they discerned informational utility in news that, objectively speaking, lacked such utility. In one experiment, opinion leaders also were more likely than nonleaders to share news perceived to contain informational utility.
The media have a strong tendency to frame political issues with a focus on personal and emotional cases. We do not, however, know if there is a close link between the news media’s use of these frames and the news preferences of the public. Such a close relationship may exist either because human interest news coverage is driven by audience demand or because the public might be influenced by the degree of individual news stories in the news. On the other hand, the audience’s news preferences may be unrelated to the actual media coverage on irregular immigration due to citizens’ selective media exposure, which may be driven by political predispositions. Based on a large quantitative content analysis conducted in the United States, France, and Norway and a following public opinion survey in the same countries, we find that the application of a human interest frame in a country’s news coverage of irregular immigration does not correspond with the public’s preferences for this type of news coverage. On the individual level, our findings demonstrate that liberal audience groups favor human interest-framed news coverage, while conservatives do not agree that individual news stories would provide a better understanding of the issue of irregular immigration.
What do citizens in the Netherlands expect from journalism? A large-scale survey shows that many audience expectations align fairly well with what experts and journalists consider important democratic functions of the press. We refer to these expectations as Civic Demands. In addition, more at odds with the profession's view, the audience wants journalism to take Citizen Demands into account: the complaints and wishes of citizens. We explore how these demands relate to audience characteristics and news media use. Findings suggest that journalists and citizens could very well cooperate in securing a future for high-quality journalism.
In the history of news production, the gap between editors' news judgment and audience interest has been widely noticeable. In scholarly research, while news consumption remains a central focus, the value of news content as a product has rarely been examined from the audience's perspective. News is almost always presumed by scholars and practitioners to be of value, which, however, is not necessarily the case in today's media environment. The recent decline in news consumption from the traditional media is often attributed to demographic factors, particularly age. However, such age-oriented narratives shift the responsibility away from news providers to users. From the media economics standpoint, when news organizations fail to address users' needs and wants, the product delivers limited utility and demand would dwindle as a result. This study conceptualizes and empirically examines the “noteworthiness” of news content as perceived by the general public. Results based on a national survey of US internet users show that only about one-third of the content produced by the mainstream news media is perceived as noteworthy. While previous studies identified demographics as significant predictors of news consumption, findings from this study suggest that perceived noteworthiness is a stronger factor influencing news consumption in terms of news enjoyment, newspaper and TV news use, and paying intent for print newspapers. Instead of using technology to pursue a particular demographic group, news organizations should rethink their content strategy and prioritize audience-oriented value creation to serve news consumers at large.
Commentators regularly lament the proliferation of both negative and/or strategic (“horse race”) coverage in political news content. The most frequent account for this trend focuses on news norms and/or the priorities of news journalists. Here, we build on recent work arguing for the importance of demand-side, rather than supply-side, explanations of news content. In short, news may be negative and/or strategy-focused because that is the kind of news that people are interested in. We use a lab study to capture participants’ news-selection biases, alongside a survey capturing their stated news preferences. Politically interested participants are more likely to select negative stories. Interest is associated with a greater preference for strategic frames as well. And results suggest that behavioral results do not conform to attitudinal ones. That is, regardless of what participants say, they exhibit a preference for negative news content.
A well-functioning democracy needs the news media to provide information to its citizens. It is therefore essential to understand what kinds of news contents contribute to gains in citizens' political knowledge and for whom this takes place. Extant research is divergent on this matter, especially with respect to ‘softer’ news coverage. This cross-national study investigates the effects of exposure to human interest and conflict frames in the news on political knowledge. Drawing on panel surveys and media content analyses in three countries, the study shows how these two frames contribute positively to political knowledge gain. This relationship is moderated by political interest so that those who are least interested learn the most from this type of easily accessible news coverage. The results are discussed in the light of research on news media and knowledge acquisition.
This research examined attributes of three social problems—pollution, poverty, and incarceration—in 300 news articles from 1995 to 2000. Coverage overwhelmingly indicated no specific cause, effect, or responsible agent for each problem, and rarely mentioned nonprofit citizen organizations or the individual-level terms “environmentalist,” “activist,” and “advocate” in content. Media coverage also did not discuss any likelihood that these problems could be solved and did not report any calls for reader action. Media content may have promoted political apathy due to a lack of connection between the social problem, nonprofit citizen organization activities, and individual behavior.
Focus groups in three cities were conducted with young adults (ages 18–29) to understand why they don't read daily print newspapers. The study examined news media avoidances, like “inconvenience” and “lack of time,” to uncover underlying meanings. Results showed prominent nonuse reasons have dimensions. Participants also suggested ways newspapers could improve. Participants were studied as two age groups, 18–24 and 25–29. Small group differences did emerge. The older group wanted less negative news, while the younger group justified it; the younger age group was more skeptical of the news and mentioned needing greater effort to understand it.
Several scholars, most notably Matt Baum, have recently argued that soft news for- mats contribute to democratic discourse, because they attract viewers who would otherwise not be exposed to news at all. I extend Baum's approach in two ways. First, Baum's theory postulates that people's appreciation of entertainment is one of the factors determining news exposure and, by extension, attention to politics, but he does not analyze the underlying utility calculation directly. I create a measure of entertainment preference and examine its impact on people's preferred news for- mats. Second, while Baum's analysis is restricted to attention paid to politics, I assess the effect of soft news preference on political knowledge. If soft news leads people to pay more attention to the "entertaining" aspect of politics, but does not actually produce any learning effects, the suggested positive consequences of soft news would have to be qualified. The main data source for this article is a survey of 2,358 randomly selected U.S. residents conducted by Knowledge Networks in Febru- ary and March 2002. Results show that people like soft news for its entertainment value but that soft news programs are still not very popular compared to hard news and pure entertainment. More critically, there is only very limited evidence that viewers actually learn from soft news. The positive consequences of soft news for the political process remain to be demonstrated.
This study explores how the American news media frame the poverty issue, looking at the way the media present its causes and solutions. It also examines the notion of frame building, exploring the factors that may influence the media's selective uses of certain frames. Media attributions of responsibility are largely societal, focusing on the causes and solutions at the social rather than personal level. Liberal newspapers made more references than conservative papers to social causes and solutions. Television news is slightly less likely than newspapers to make social-level attributions.
Two broadcast news stories were manipulated to show victimization (food poisoning, handgun violence) in one of three versions: without victim exemplification, with exemplification by unemotional victims, and with exemplification by highly emotional victims. Male and female respondents, whose empathic sensitivity had been predetermined, recorded their own perceptions of each issue addressed: its severity as a national problem, the likelihood of it becoming a local problem, and the likelihood that they themselves might be placed at risk. They also indicated their reaction to each news story. Emotional victim exemplification fostered perceptions of greater problem severity than unemotional and no victim exemplification. Additionally, emotional victim exemplification, compared with no exemplification, fostered perceptions of increased victimization risk to self, whereas unemotional victim exemplification failed to do so. Empathic sensitivity did not interact with exemplar emotionality, but produced a main effect. Highly empathic persons perceived the severity of danger and risk to themselves as greater than did less empathic persons. Respondent gender similarly produced a main effect without interacting with exemplar emotionality. Female respondents assessed all dangers and risks as higher than did their male counterparts. Finally, exposure to emotional exemplification, but not unemotional exemplification, fostered reports of greater distress reactions than did exposure to the news stories without exemplification. Women reported greater distress than did men, and highly empathic persons reported greater distress than did less empathic persons.
This article identifies key changes in society and the media that have shaped political communication in many democracies over the postwar period. Three distinct ages are described. In the first, much political communication was subordinate to relatively strong and stable political institutions and beliefs. In the second, faced with a more mobile electorate, the parties increasingly "professionalized" and adapted their communications to the news values and formats of limited-channel television. In the third (still emerging) age of media abundance, political communication may be reshaped by five trends: intensified professionalizing imperatives, increased competitive pressures, anti-elitist populism, a process of "centrifugal diversification," and changes in how people receive politics. This system is full of tensions, sets new research priorities, and reopens long-standing issues of democratic theory.
In the United States, television news is where the issue of tabloidisation is most loudly debated, as news merges into the countless talk shows and syndicated “reality” programming. While critics often place the blame on the journalism profession itself, I focus on the audience drive toward tabloidisation, critiquing both the uncritical celebration of the “active” audience, and the view that audiences are simply mindless recipients of whatever journalists feed them. Using data from a small study of news audiences, I argue that we must understand the value of dramatic, narrative news in everyday life. At the same time, I argue that the storytelling news style, characterised by disconnected, highly personal narratives, is in danger of replacing rational, considered, and critical analysis in news. In particular, young people are becoming less interested in news, and less critical of the techniques typical of tabloid style. I conclude that we must strive to develop a journalism that could embrace tabloid style, while still inviting audiences to participate more fully in a civic democracy. If journalism cannot rise to that challenge, it may be that in the tabloidised environment of the American news media, the battle for large-scale, serious public discourse is already lost.
Work in political communication has discussed the ongoing predominance of negative news, but has offered few convincing accounts for this focus. A growing body of literature shows that humans regularly pay more attention to negative information than to positive information, however. This paper argues that we should view the nature of news content in part as a consequence of this asymmetry bias observed in human behavior. A psychophysiological experiment capturing viewers' reactions to actual news content shows that negative news elicits stronger and more sustained reactions than does positive news. Results are discussed as they pertain to political behavior and communication, and to politics and political institutions more generally.
News value research has contributed a great deal to the understanding of news selection. For a long time scholars focused exclusively on news selection by the media. Yet, more recent approaches - inspired by cognitive psychology - have conceptionalized news factors as relevance indicators that not only serve as selection criteria in journalism, but also guide information processing by the audience. This article examines the theoretical and methodological developments in the German research tradition and discusses selected results for newspaper and television news. Its theoretical perspective focuses on the conceptionalization of news factors as either event characteristics or characteristics of the reality construction by journalists and recipients. This article explores how and why news factors affect media use and the retention of news items. Finally, this contribution's empirical perspective discusses various modifications of the assumed factors and presents methodological advancements in the measurement of news factors in selection processes.
Previously it has been perceived as a citizen's duty to follow the news and to keep oneself informed about politics and current affairs. Recently however, it appears as if a growing number of citizens ignore the information opportunities given to them.Changes in the media environment have given people cross-nationally more of a choice as to which media diet they prefer, and for the American case, Prior (2007, Post-Broadcast Democracy. How Media Choice Increases inequality in Political Involvement and Polarize Elections. New York: Cambridge University Press) have demonstrated that in an era of cable TV and Internet, people more readily remove themselves from political knowledge and political action then they did before. Thus, in this article we study those who tune out the world of news and current affairs. We ask if there is an increase of what we call disconnected citizens across Europe. We also ask who these disconnected citizens are and discuss why they have tuned out. Based on pooled data from four waves of the European Social Survey, covering 33 European countries, using several innovative multilevel analyse techniques we demonstrate how national context or the media environment moderates the influence of individual level factors in news consumption.
Recent reports published by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (2000, 2004) propose that young audiences are abandoning traditional news as a source of election information in favor of late-night comedy programs. However, additional evidence (Young and Tisinger, 2006) suggests that exposure to late-night comedy programming is positively correlated with traditional news exposure. This study extends this body of research by offering evidence that exposure to late-night comedy is associated with increases in attention paid to the presidential campaign in national network and cable news. The analysis uses data collected via the National Annenberg Election Survey during the 2004 presidential primary season, between October 30, 2003, and June 4, 2004. Cross-sectional results demonstrate that viewers of late-night comedy programs-specifically viewers of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and The Late Show with David Letterman, as well as Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart-pay more attention to the campaign in national network and cable news than nonviewers, controlling for a variety of factors. An analysis of time trends also reveals that the rate of increase in news attention over the course of the primary season is greater for viewers of Leno or Letterman than for those who do not watch any late-night comedy.
The behavior and attitude of the voters in the 1952 election are examined in terms of three independent variables established for this study: party identification, candidate orientation, and issue orientation. Within this framework, the analysis has been organized to test two hypotheses: (a) the motivation of political behavior is effective in direct relation to the number of congruent forces that motivate the individual; and (b) that the effectiveness of these motivating forces is reduced if there is conflict among them. The concepts and categories of this analysis are applied to show significant similarities and contrasts with the 1948 election, and extended to other electoral decisions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This study argues that, due to selective political coverage by the entertainment-oriented, soft news media, many otherwise politically inattentive individuals are exposed to information about high-profile political issues, most prominently foreign policy crises, as an incidental by-product of seeking entertainment. I conduct a series of statistical investigations examining the relationship between individual media consumption and attentiveness to several recent high-profile foreign policy crisis issues. For purposes of comparison, I also investigate several non-foreign crisis issues, some of which possess characteristics appealing to soft news programs and others of which lack such characteristics. I find that information about foreign crises, and other issues possessing similar characteristics, presented in a soft news context, has indeed attracted the attention of politically uninvolved Americans. The net effect is a reduced disparity in attentiveness to select high-profile political issues across different segments of the public.
L'A. montre que chaque individu tient a etre tenu informe des differents evenements qui surviennent au cours de l'existence et cela qu'il soit concerne ou non par l'information. Il estime que la connaissance permet de reduire, de repondre a certains dangers, a certaines peurs. Il s'efforce de comprendre l'importance de l'information dans le cadre de la vie humaine. Il estime que le besoin d'information s'est manifeste des la Prehistoire. Il presente une analyse de type evolutionniste de ce type de besoin qui fait intervenir a la fois une dimension biologique et culturelle