No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
The journalistic preference for extreme exemplars: educational socialization, psychological biases, or editorial policy?
Abstract
Exemplars are central in news reporting. However, extreme negative exemplars can bias citizens’ factual perceptions and attributions of political responsibility. Nonetheless, our knowledge of the factors shaping journalistic preferences for including exemplars in news stories is limited. We investigate the extent to which educational socialization, psychological biases, and editorial policy shape journalistic preferences for extreme negative exemplars. We field large-scale survey experiments to a population sample of journalism students, a nationally representative sample of citizens, and a representative sample of “young people” and obtain evaluations of news value, newsworthiness, and behavioral measures of the actual write-up of news articles. We find significant support for the role of editorial policy and limited support for the role of educational socialization and psychological biases. In a time where economic pressures and the proliferation of digital media potentially lead editors to prioritize clickbait, these findings suggest that structural biases in news coverage may be aggravated.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Politicians engage in, and the media amplifies, social constructions of welfare recipients as undeserving. Such messaging seeks to influence mass public opinion, but what are the effects on the target population receiving welfare benefits? We test if deservingness messaging affects welfare recipients' mental health. To do so, we exploit a quasi-experiment entailing a dramatic shift in deservingness messaging after a welfare recipient in Denmark became the subject of a national debate, utilizing detailed administrative data on the ensuing consumption of antidepressants by other welfare recipients. We find evidence that welfare recipients experienced worse mental health outcomes after being exposed to deservingness messaging, reflected in a 1.2-percentage-point increase in the use of antidepressants in the weeks following the airing of a critical interview. Deservingness messaging particularly affected more vulnerable groups who had a history of mental health problems.
Significance
Our minds are tuned to the uncommon or unexpected in our environment. In most environments, members of minority groups are just that—uncommon. Therefore, the cognitive system is tuned to spotting their presence. Our results indicate that individuals from minority groups are salient in perception, memory, and visual awareness. As a result, we consistently overestimate their presence—leading to an illusion of diversity: the environment seems to be more diverse than it actually is, decreasing our support for diversity-promoting measures. As we try to make equitable decisions, it is important that private individuals and decision-makers alike become aware of this biased perception. While these sorts of biases can be counteracted, one must first be aware of the bias.
This study examines journalists’ language in their reporting and what their word choices reveal about their cognitive mindsets. Reporters on the campaign trail often cannot afford to engage in systematic information processing as they distill complex political situations under deadline pressures. Twitter’s emphasis on speed and informal cultural milieu can further lead journalists to rely on heuristics and emotions. Drawing upon insights from theories of the mind, memory, and language, this study explores how cognitive biases are embodied in journalistic work across different media. We built a large-scale dataset of text corpora that consisted of more than 220,000 news articles, broadcast transcripts, and tweets generated over a year by 73 campaign reporters in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Leveraging this unique dataset of journalistic outputs from a campaign season, we conducted automated text analyses. Results suggest that heuristics and intuitive thinking played a significant role in the generation of content on Twitter. Journalists infused their tweets with more emotion, compared to when they appeared in traditional media such as newspapers and broadcasts. Journalists’ tweets contained fewer words related to analytical and long-term thinking than their writing. Journalists also used informal language in their tweets to connect with their audiences in more personal and casual manners. Across all media examined in the study, journalists described the current race by drawing upon their experience of covering prior presidential elections, a form of anchoring heuristic. This study extends the use of cognitive biases in politics to a new realm, reporting, and shows how journalists’ use of language on the campaign trail reflects cognitive biases that arise when individuals make decisions under time pressure and uncertainty.
Do people with a more pessimistic worldview also select more like-minded news that confirms their negative—sometimes irrational—outlook on reality? This study theorizes that, based on the negativity and confirmation biases in audience digital news selection, a pessimistic outlook increases the likelihood of self-selection of more negative and episodic headlines over positive and thematic news. In a next step, news media literacy (NML) literature is consulted to explore how to counter this tendency to, via news selection, confirm an overly negative and distorted worldview. A selective-exposure experiment (N = 612) monitored participants’ self-selection of crime news after exposure to NML interventions. Findings show that those participants who hold a more pessimistic outlook on crime in society tend to confirm this worldview by self-selecting into more negative crime news. Exposure to NML interventions concerning negativity bias or clickbait was found to mitigate this negativity bias in news selection, especially for those who already hold a pessimistic outlook. This study is the first to document that NML interventions can potentially have merits as a tool to combat negativity bias in online news selection.
This article explores the changing roles of Social Media Editors (SMEs) in the field of journalism, focusing on their unique position as mediators between online news consumers, marketing departments, and newsrooms. Based on in-depth interviews, our findings suggest that, far beyond their origins as comment field moderators, SMEs now play a crucial role in integrating complex behavioral data from social network sites and circulating this data in the newsroom to align news production with perceived audience tastes. Our findings also suggest that while SMEs identify with traditional norms of professional journalism, they also work closely with staff in marketing departments and draw on marketing language and imagery when describing their work. Ultimately, we find that our SME participants experience their increasingly central role in the newsroom in contradictory and ambivalent ways, at times defending traditional professional values, while at other times voicing support for audience sovereignty and giving readers what they want. In this way, if Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory suggests that journalism is structured by an ongoing struggle between exogeneous (commercial and marketing) logics and endogenous professional values, the changing roles of SMEs indicate the arrival of a new stage in this struggle – a stage marked by the deep and virtually uncontested advance of marketing terminology and goals into the journalistic field. In this restructured professional field, individual SMEs are thus left with the difficult task of reconciling, at the level of habitus, internalized tensions between ascendant marketing imperatives and residual but still-cherished journalistic dispositions and values.
Studies suggest a growing interdependence between journalists and Twitter. What is behind this interdependence, and how does it manifest in news texts? We argue that social media platforms (and Twitter in particular) have situated themselves as purveyors of legitimated content, a projection that journalists have not fully challenged and at times abetted. Instead, journalists rely on these platforms both for access to powerful users and as conduits to surface the words of ‘ordinary people.’ This practice treats tweets more like content, an interchangeable building block of news, than like sources, whose ideas and messages must be verified. Using a corpus of U.S. news stories with tweets in them, we provide empirical evidence for our argument of the power of platforms to legitimate speech and shape journalism. This study illuminates journalists’ role in transferring some of the press’s authority to Twitter, thereby shaping the participants in and content of public deliberation.
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.
Changes to the media environment have increased polarized voting in America through both addition and subtraction. We argue that the decline of local newspapers has contributed to the nationalization of American politics: as local newspapers close, Americans rely more heavily on available national news or partisan heuristics to make political decisions. We assess the impact of newspaper closures on polarized voting, using genetic matching to compare counties that are statistically similar but for the loss of a local newspaper. We identify a small but significant causal decrease in split-ticket voting in presidential and senatorial elections in these matched communities: in areas where a newspaper closed, split-ticket voting decreased by 1.9%.
Media stories often reach citizens via a two-step process, transmitted to them indirectly via their social networks. Why are some media stories strongly transmitted and impact opinions powerfully in this two-step flow while others quickly perish? Integrating classical research on the two-step flow of political communication and novel theories from cognitive psychology, this article outlines a model for understanding the strength of political frames in the two-step flow. It argues that frames that resonate with cognitive biases (that is, deep-seated psychological decision rules) will be transmitted more and have a stronger influence on opinion when citizens recollect media frames in their social networks. Focusing on the case of episodic and thematic frames, the study tests this model. It introduces a novel research design: implementing the children’s game ‘Telephone’ in consecutive experimental online surveys fielded to nationally representative samples. This design helps gauge the reliability of transmission and the degree of persuasiveness in actual chains of transmission.
Opinions expressed by the common (wo)man on the street influence audience judgments about perceived public opinion and even people’s own opinion. While we know from experimental research that the distribution of opinions expressed in vox pop interviews—the balance between pro and contra quotes, for example—influences audiences, little research has actually looked at the distribution of opinions expressed in vox pops in the real world. Are the vox pops shown in news items balanced or not? We address this research gap by analyzing the opinion balance of vox pop statements with a specific focus on political news. We conducted an in-depth content analysis on a random sample of 2000 vox pop interviews in Belgian (Flanders) main evening television news drawn from a total population of vox pop interviews in the period 2003–2013. Results show that in half of the news items in which they are used, vox pops present opinions and that vox pops play an important role in political news. We find that, contrary to our expectations, the opinions expressed in vox pops are unbalanced both in non-political and political news. A large majority of vox pop news items contains vox pop voices that present only one point of view.
Studies on news values have provided many insights into what gets reported in the media. In this study we use the concept of news values to examine how journalists perceive the newsworthiness of party messages. Taking an innovative approach, fictional party press releases are used to test for the influence of five important news values in the context of political news in a factorial survey experiment. This allows us to study those news values in relation to one another in a controlled experimental setting, an advantage over traditional gatekeeping studies. Political journalists in Switzerland and the Netherlands were asked to indicate whether they would consider these press releases for reporting or not. Findings show that the power status of the party, unexpectedness, and the magnitude of the political action announced influence journalists’ perception of newsworthiness. Messages from parties that were part of government were more likely to be selected for coverage in the Netherlands, whereas the party did not matter in Switzerland, where power is distributed more evenly. This shows that political system characteristics influence the work of journalists. Opposed to results from content analyses of news output, some news values (personal status, conflict) did not prove to be relevant. In the conclusion section we elaborate on potential explanations.
Using data from the 2008 and 2009 Current Population Survey (CPS) conducted by the United States Census Bureau, this article assesses the year-over-year change in the civic engagement of citizens in America's largest metropolitan areas. Of special interest are Denver and Seattle, where the Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer closed during the intervening year. The data from the CPS indicate that civic engagement in Seattle and Denver dropped significantly from 2008 to 2009—a decline that is not consistently replicated over the same time period in other major American cities that did not lose a newspaper. The analysis suggests that this decline may plausibly be attributed to the newspaper closures in Seattle and Denver. This short-term negative effect is concerning, and whether it lasts warrants future attention.
Health journalists often use personal stories to put a "face" on a health issue. This research uses a sociology-of-news approach, based on data collected from 42 in-depth interviews and three surveys with health journalists and editors [national (N = 774), state (N = 55), and purposive (N = 180)], to provide a first look at how important journalists think exemplars are to their stories. Results show journalists select exemplars to inform, inspire, and/or sensationalize a health issue. Some of the strategies journalists use to locate exemplars pose ethical concerns. Further, journalists rank the use of exemplars lower in aiding audience understanding compared with the use of experts, data and statistics, and definitions of technical terms.
Objectivity is a cornerstone in the journalistic profession. There is a widespread acknowledgement that a one-to-one representation of reality is not possible, and thus the norm must be interpreted by journalists in their daily work. Based on a journalist survey among Danish journalists (N = 2008) we find that journalists’ role perceptions have substantial explanatory power in regard to how journalists implement the objectivity norm. The objectivity norm pervades the news production process by guiding journalists when they select, gather, and present the news, and the results give a hint about how journalistic role perceptions might affect the production process through the objectivity norm and subsequently also the news content.
In news broadcasts, there is a growing tendency to rely on the voices of ordinary people in comparison with offi cial voices, such as media professionals and experts. In our study, which is based on a quantitative and qualitative content analysis and interviews with journalists, we look at the vox pops on the Dutch public service newscast, NOS News. This article addresses questions of how ordinary people take part in public discussion - what kind of views and emotions they express – and how journalists assess the quality of the vox pops and the emotional expression they include. Our study is discussed in the context of citizen participation in public life through the mass media, the emotionalising of news journalism and the crisis of public service broadcasting. We suggest that the emotional dimension of news, exemplified in the vox pops interviews, should be examined in terms of its potential to foster passions and identities that connect people with public life and with each other.
The purpose of this study is to test the two-component theory of news selection. Its components are (a) news factors included in articles and (b) news values of news factors. It is assumed that news factors have different news values for various media outlets. The theory was tested comparing the empirical (measured) with the theoretical (calculated) newsworthiness of news stories. First, news values of five news factors for national quality papers, regional papers, and tabloids were identified. Then, based on theory, the theoretical newsworthiness of news stories was calculated. The independent variables were the news factors included in these articles and the news values of these news factors. In addition, in a laboratory setting, the empirical newsworthiness of the news stories was measured. Finally, measured newsworthiness was compared to the predicted one. Results confirmed the two-component theory and demonstrated that the chances of news stories to get published can be predicted by news factors and their news values.
Sensationalism in journalism has been a popular topic of fiery discussions for centuries. Yet, it appears that this topic is more often debated than systematically investigated. Indeed, the word, sensationalism, has become an easy name-calling device for those who are in the mood for criticizing the mass media. Even in academic circles, the term has been used with little precision. The goal of this study is to take a step towards explicating the concept. The most common but vague classification of the concept is by content. stories about crime, accidents, disaster, and scandal. A few scholars acknowledge that formal features may play a role in what we have come to call sensational, but precisely how the packaging of stories contributes to sensationalism remains virtually unexplored, especially in terms of television news. This study focuses on both the content and form of two television news magazine programs on opposite ends of the sensational/"proper" journalism spectrum to provide insights into the dimensions of sensationalism.
Election campaigns in advanced democracies are highly mediated events. Thus, the electorate has come to depend upon the media for information regarding the election, the parties and their policies. At the same time, research indicates that the news coverage of elections tends to be structurally biased, in the sense that the media coverage is episodic rather than thematic and that it is focused on the horse race and the political strategies of the competing parties rather than on the issues at stake. However, comparative studies of election news coverage in different countries are still somewhat lacking. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to compare the election news coverage in Britain and Sweden, two countries that are part of different models of media and political systems. The study investigates the election news coverage in two major broadsheets and one major tabloid in each country, during the last three weeks before the Swedish Election in 2002 and the British Election in 2005. The results show several significant differences between the Swedish and the British election news coverage.
This study aims to shed light on the news selection process by examining the news values currently operational in British newspapers. The study takes as its starting point Galtung and Ruge's widely cited taxonomy of news values established in their 1965 study and puts these criteria to the test in an empirical analysis of news published in three national daily UK newspapers. A review of Galtung and Ruge's original study as well as a wider review of related literature is provided. The findings of the news content analysis are used to evaluate critically Galtung and Ruge's original criteria and to propose a contemporary set of news values.
Evidence suggests that our foraging ancestors engaged in the small-scale equivalent of social insurance as an essential tool of survival and evolved a sophisticated psychology of social exchange (involving the social emotions of compassion and anger) to regulate mutual assistance. Here, we hypothesize that political support for modern welfare policies are shaped by these evolved mental programs. In particular, the compassionate motivation to share with needy nonfamily could not have evolved without defenses against opportunists inclined to take without contributing. Cognitively, such parasitic strategies can be identified by the intentional avoidance of productive effort. When detected, this pattern should trigger anger and down-regulate support for assistance. We tested predictions derived from these hypotheses in four studies in two cultures, showing that subjects' perceptions of recipients' effort to find work drive welfare opinions; that such perceptions (and not related perceptions) regulate compassion and anger (and not related emotions); that the effects of perceptions of recipients' effort on opinions about welfare are mediated by anger and compassion, independently of political ideology; and that these emotions not only influence the content of welfare opinions but also how easily they are formed.
Experts in law, psychology, and economics explore the power of "fast and frugal" heuristics in the creation and implementation of law
In recent decades, the economists' concept of rational choice has dominated legal reasoning. And yet, in practical terms, neither the lawbreakers the law addresses nor officers of the law behave as the hyperrational beings postulated by rational choice. Critics of rational choice and believers in "fast and frugal heuristics" propose another approach: using certain formulations or general principles (heuristics) to help navigate in an environment that is not a well-ordered setting with an occasional disturbance, as described in the language of rational choice, but instead is fundamentally uncertain or characterized by an unmanageable degree of complexity. This is the intuition behind behavioral law and economics. In Heuristics and the Law, experts in law, psychology, and economics explore the conceptual and practical power of the heuristics approach in law. They discuss legal theory; modeling and predicting the problems the law purports to solve; the process of making law, in the legislature or in the courtroom; the application of existing law in the courts, particularly regarding the law of evidence; and implementation of the law and the impact of law on behavior.
ContributorsRonald J. Allen, Hal R. Arkes, Peter Ayton, Susanne Baer, Martin Beckenkamp, Robert Cooter, Leda Cosmides, Mandeep K. Dhami, Robert C. Ellickson, Christoph Engel, Richard A. Epstein, Wolfgang Fikentscher, Axel Flessner, Robert H. Frank, Bruno S. Frey, Gerd Gigerenzer, Paul W. Glimcher, Daniel G. Goldstein, Chris Guthrie, Jonathan Haidt, Reid Hastie, Ralph Hertwig, Eric J. Johnson, Jonathan J. Koehler, Russell Korobkin, Stephanie Kurzenhäuser, Douglas A. Kysar, Donald C. Langevoort, Richard Lempert, Stefan Magen, Callia Piperides, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski, Clara Sattler de Sousa e Brito, Joachim Schulz, Victoria A. Shaffer, Indra Spiecker genannt Döhmann, John Tooby, Gerhard Wagner, Elke U. Weber, Bernd Wittenbrink
In spite of what appears to be the increasingly negative tone of media coverage, this Element suggests that the prevalence of positive news is likely to increase, for three reasons: (1) valence-based asymmetries vary over time, (2) valence-based asymmetries vary across individuals, and (3) technology facilitates diverse news platforms catering to diverse preferences. Each of these claims is examined in detail here, based on analyses of prior and/or novel data on media content, psychophysiological responses, and survey-based experiments. Results are considered as they relate to our understanding of media gatekeeping, political communication, and political psychology, and also as actionable findings for producers of media content, communications platforms, and media consumers.
This study presents the first global perspective on journalists’ perception of temporal acceleration in their professional life. Based on the second wave of Worlds of Journalism Study data, encompassing 63 countries and 26,514 replies, the article pursues the question of how journalists perceive time pressure at the workplace. The article looks further at the answers of those journalists who have been in the job for more than five years, whether they saw time pressure increase, decrease or stay the same. Based on a sample of 17,382 responses, this study places the answers into distinct clusters. These are used to establish a ranking of the 63 countries in terms of work time perceptions. It emerges that, even when using the single indicator of time pressure, clear inferences can be made about the ways information is acquired and how this affects journalists’ working practices.
Do partisan disagreements over politically relevant facts, and preferences for the information sources from which to obtain them, represent genuine differences of opinion or insincere cheerleading? The answer to this question is crucial for understanding the scope of partisan polarization. We test between these alternatives with experiments that offer incentives for correct survey responses and allow respondents to search for information before answering each question. We find that partisan cheerleading inflates divides in factual information, but only modestly. Incentives have no impact on partisan divides in information search; these divides are no different from those that occur outside the survey context when we examine web‐browsing data from the same respondents. Overall, our findings support the motivated reasoning interpretation of misinformation; partisans seek out information with congenial slant and sincerely adopt inaccurate beliefs that cast their party in a favorable light.
Journalists often include exemplars in their reporting to produce news that is perceived as appealing and informative. In this paper, we ask the question whether the audience perceives news with ordinary citizens as exemplars as more appealing and informative, as argued by the journalists. Relying on two survey experiments based on samples representative of the adult Danish population, we show that news stories with exemplars are perceived as more appealing, but we also see a tendency toward lower levels of perceived informativeness. In addition, we also document that effects of exemplars depend on the characteristics of the exemplars, and the characteristics of the news audience. In a concluding section, we discuss the implications of our findings for journalism practice and future research.
Over the past few decades, scholars have observed an increase in ordinary citizens as actors in everyday news coverage, mostly at the cost of elite actors. While this has been welcomed by most as democratization of news, it remains unclear in which functions citizens appear in news reports and whether they substantially add to public discourse. This special issue tries to gain greater insight into the role of ordinary citizens in the news and their conceptualization, selection, and depiction. Drawing from a multitude of research strands concerned with citizen depictions in the media, this editorial starts off by addressing some most pressing issues in this strand of research and proposes a categorization of the various forms and functions in which citizens can appear in news coverage.
The news media industry has changed as the internet and social media have matured and become integral to modern life. I describe these changes through a theoretical analysis of the economic structure of the industry and explore the implications for scholars of online media and politics. The crux of my argument is that social media simultaneously serves as a distribution platform and reputation builder, as social recommendations take the place of expensive investments in high-quality journalism. This development rendered crucial portions of previous models of the market for news inaccurate due to the declining importance of firm reputation. This mechanism interacts with the massive heterogeneity in digital literacy and growing animosity toward the news media among conservatives to create “credibility cascades,” which I argue are a necessary condition for Fake News to flourish.
The level of journalistic resources dedicated to coverage of local politics is in a long-term decline in the US news media, with readership shifting to national outlets. We investigate whether this trend is demand- or supply-driven, exploiting a recent wave of local television station acquisitions by a conglomerate owner. Using extensive data on local news programming and viewership, we find that the ownership change led to (1) substantial increases in coverage of national politics at the expense of local politics, (2) a significant rightward shift in the ideological slant of coverage, and (3) a small decrease in viewership, all relative to the changes at other news programs airing in the same media markets. These results suggest a substantial supply-side role in the trends toward nationalization and polarization of politics news, with negative implications for accountability of local elected officials and mass polarization.
The editor has often been hidden in scholarship under the catch-all term of ‘journalist’. Yet the roles of editor and reporter, while overlapping, are distinct. That distinction is essential to make because the editorial function is one of the defining characteristics of news journalism that separates it from ‘interloper media’ such as blogs, public relations (PR), government missives and citizen journalism. Editors are a marker of quality control which legitimises news journalism. This article scrutinises the editor as one who negotiates among four groups with distinct values: the audience, the organisation, journalism as practice, and society. Editor-centric analysis examines how individuals in editorial systems negotiate diverse elements of a fragmented phenomenon which is routinely unified under the banner of ‘journalism’. Clearer assessment of the editor thus allows for richer assessment of what is – and what is not – journalism. It directs discourse rooted in experience and ideology to legitimate journalism as a cultural form, leading consideration of how editor-centric study can be applied empirically.
The literature suggests that journalists give a substantial amount of attention to Twitter and use the platform widely, but the impact of that use on news judgment has not been assessed. We hypothesize that Twitter affects journalists’ news judgment, impacting coverage decisions. To test this, we conducted an online survey experiment on working US journalists (N = 212). We find that journalists who use Twitter less in their work discount news they see on the platform, potentially causing them to dismiss information that many of their colleagues identify as newsworthy. Our results also indicate that the routinization of Twitter into news production affects news judgment – for journalists who incorporate Twitter into their reporting routines, and those with fewer years of experience, Twitter has become so normalized that tweets were deemed equally newsworthy as headlines appearing to be from the AP wire. This may have negative implications, such as pack journalism, but we also see positives, as Twitter may conduit a wider array of voices into the mainstream news agenda. Twitter plays a key role in journalistic practices including, as we demonstrate here, influencing journalists’ news judgment. Twitter’s growing centrality in the news process warrants greater scrutiny from journalists and scholars.
This paper offers a formal-theoretical account for the preponderance of negative news content. It draws on work suggesting that humans and news media prioritize outlying information and argues that one reason for a negativity bias in news consumption and production is that negative information is more “outlying”: that is, further away from expectations. Expectations change over time, however, and so too do negativity (and other) biases. This dynamic is explored using some simple simulations, followed by an empirical explication using data on the U.S. economy alongside media coverage of the economy and public economic expectations. The end result is a broadly-generalizable account of the shifting prominence of “outlying” information.
Previous studies have shown that cases in news reporting have substantial attitudinal effects on the audience. The direction of results has been mixed, however. Some studies reported that news audience change opinion in favour of the position of the case, while other studies reported the opposite. In this article, we emphasize the deservingness of cases as a potential factor explaining the differences in previous results. In two population-based survey experiments, we empirically investigate how exposure to cases in the news affects the audience’s opinion about the political issue covered. Drawing on insights from welfare state studies, we argue that the deservingness of cases drives the effect of cases on public opinion. Our results confirm this assumption. In a concluding section, we discuss the implications of our results.
Journalists use ordinary people as exemplars in their news stories to make their reports more interesting and understandable for the audience. This journalistic practice has often been discussed as a potential democratic problem because of its effects on perceptions of and attitudes toward political issues. Taking exemplification theory as our starting point and drawing on research from decision-making and social psychology literature, we add to this discussion by examining how exemplars in news reports affect intentions to participate in political activities. Using an experimental design, we randomly exposed respondents to a news report with or without exemplars or no news report at all. We found that for respondents who were similar to the exemplars, exposure to a news report with exemplars triggered an empathic concern and increased political participation intentions. For dissimilar respondents, exposure to a news report with exemplars decreased empathic concern, which in turn decreased political participation intentions. By highlighting these differential effects of exemplars in the news media on political participation, the study shows how a common journalistic practice potentially engages some citizens in democracy and disengages others.
The study of journalistic roles tends to be descriptive and is thin on theory. This article advances an understanding of journalistic roles as being discursively constituted and builds on the notion of journalism as a discursive institution. Journalistic roles are negotiated in a relational structure—the discursive field—where journalists, news outlets, and media organizations struggle over discursive authority in conversations about journalism's identity and locus in society. Journalistic roles are articulated and enacted on 2 distinct levels: role orientations (normative and cognitive roles) and role performance (practiced and narrated roles). The process model of journalistic roles proposes a circular structure, where normative, cognitive, practiced, and narrated roles are connected through processes of internalization, enactment, reflection, normalization, and negotiation.
Political communication is a precondition of democracy, and democracy depends heavily on the infrastructure of the media system (see chapters 1 and 2). The media and mediated communication are of central relevance for contemporary societies due to their decisive influence on, and consequences for, political institutions, political actors, and individual citizens. Political actors have learnt to accept that their behavior to a significant extent is influenced by the rules of the game set by the mass media. This transformation has been described as a shift to audience democracy (Manin 1995) or media democracy (Jarren 2008a). The idea of media democracy is an extension of the model of representative democracy (see Chapter 3). It refers to a development that at its beginning aimed to make politics more inclusive and transparent. In the process policy-makers have become accountable to an ever growing volume of interests and demands from the public — not only in the context of elections but in many phases of the policy process. The pressure on policy-makers to be responsive to public opinion in general and special interests in particular has increased the role of the mass media in many ways. Politicians have grown to rely on the mass media for gauging public opinion (using media coverage as a proxy for public sentiments), and for generating attention, acceptance, and legitimation of their actions (using media channels for public presentation of politics).
This book explores the political implications of the human tendency to prioritize negative information over positive information. Drawing on literatures in political science, psychology, economics, communications, biology, and physiology, this book argues that “negativity biases” should be evident across a wide range of political behaviors. These biases are then demonstrated through a diverse and cross-disciplinary set of analyses, for instance: in citizens' ratings of presidents and prime ministers; in aggregate-level reactions to economic news, across 17 countries; in the relationship between covers and newsmagazine sales; and in individuals' physiological reactions to network news content. The pervasiveness of negativity biases extends, this book suggests, to the functioning of political institutions - institutions that have been designed to prioritize negative information in the same way as the human brain.
In the present article, we investigate socialization practices in the newsroom. The analyses demonstrate how journalist trainees are socialized into this particular professional culture and community of practice. Theoretically, we combine traditional news ethnography with linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, and theories of profession in order to investigate and interpret social and cultural (re)production in the routinized practice in the newsroom. The units of analysis are interactions between journalist trainees and their editors concerning ideas for news stories. These interactions play a key role in the socialization process as important loci for learning about the craft because of the constant reinforcement of competent practice which takes place here. Thus, these interactions are important sites for cultural production and reproduction that support the building of professional vision.
The impact of immigration and rising ethnic diversity on support for the welfare state has been the subject of intense debate. Previous European research has found little evidence for an aggregate impact of diversity on support for welfare, but has not tested for discrimination between claimants at the individual level. This article presents two survey experiments which demonstrate that, in the ethnically diverse, high immigration British context, white majority respondents favour co-ethnic welfare claimants over foreign-born or ethnically different claimants. Both race and migrant status trigger discrimination, and the impact of these is cumulative, so a foreign-born Muslim claimant suffers a ‘double disadvantage’. Three mechanisms contribute to discrimination. Ethnocentrism reduces willingness to support minority welfare claimants, but not co-ethnic claimants. Economic insecurity increases support for co-ethnic welfare claimants, but not minority claimants. The perception that welfare claimants are generally undeserving of help has a larger negative impact on minority claimants than on co-ethnic claimants.
A robust finding in the welfare state literature is that public support for the welfare state differs widely across countries. Yet recent research on the psychology of welfare support suggests that people everywhere form welfare opinions using psychological predispositions designed to regulate interpersonal help giving using cues regarding recipient effort. We argue that this implies that cross-national differences in welfare support emerge from mutable differences in stereotypes about recipient efforts rather than deep differences in psychological predispositions. Using free-association tasks and experiments embedded in large-scale, nationally representative surveys collected in the United States and Denmark, we test this argument by investigating the stability of opinion differences when faced with the presence and absence of cues about the deservingness of specific welfare recipients. Despite decades of exposure to different cultures and welfare institutions, two sentences of information can make welfare support across the U. S. and Scandinavian samples substantially and statistically indistinguishable.
An abundance of evidence suggests that exhibiting a confident nonverbal demeanor helps individuals ascend social hierarchies. The current research examines some of the implications of having individuals in positions of power who exhibit such nonverbal confidence. Three studies examined dyads that worked together on decision-making tasks. It was found that people participated less in a discussion when they interacted with a powerful individual who exhibited confidence than when a powerful individual did not exhibit confidence. Moreover, people who interacted with a confident powerful individual participated less because they viewed that individual to be more competent. People even deferred to the confident powerful individual’s opinions when that individual was wrong, leading to suboptimal joint decisions. Moderation analyses suggest the powerful individual was able to mitigate the effects of a confident demeanor somewhat by also showing an open nonverbal demeanor.
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.
Synthesizing several theories about the likely impact of case reports in the news, we propose that the impact of featuring identified victims in a news story is contingent on the degree of similarity between the audience member and the identified victims. We execute a population-based survey experiment involving immigration policy to examine our theory. Our results suggest that featuring specific, identified victims in a news story will promote more supportive policy opinions than otherwise identical stories about unidentified victims, but only when the victim is highly similar to the audience member. Conversely, case reports featuring identified people who are dissimilar to the audience member will decrease the extent to which the story encourages victim-supportive policy attitudes. Overall, our experimental findings shed light on the conditions under which the inclusion of case reports increases versus decreases the policy relevance of news stories. Our findings also help explain previous inconsistencies in findings about the impact of case reports. Additional analyses allow us to speculate as to the reasons for the differential direction of effects.
Media logic is the key to understanding mediatization and its driving forces. Since news organizations simultaneously are market and non-market organizations, media logic is conceived of as an institution that is both normative and market driven. Consequently, the definition of news media logic rests on assumptions from both the normative and the rational choice approach to institutions. Two sets of institutional rules are identified: professional norms based on values (independence and objectivity) and professional standards based on rules for the production of news (craft rules and form rules). The institutionalization of news media logic is conceived of as an evolutionary process, where the norms and standards are assumed to have emerged and become established endogenously. Thus, the process of institutionalization is believed to be explained primarily by processes of institutional learning. In order to justify the power of journalists, the very meanings of the norms of independence and objectivity have been widened, and the professional standards have become increasingly refined. My main conclusion is that news media logic has emerged as a single coherent institution in most Western democracies, and that the biggest democratic challenge is not the performance of the media, but the fact that journalists today can exercise a lot of power without any actual counterweights.
Facial expressions are an important aspect of social interaction, conveying not only information regarding emotional states, but also regarding intentions, personality, and complex social characteristics. The present research investigates how a smiling, compared to a nonsmiling, expression impacts decision making and underlying cognitive and emotional processes in economic bargaining. Our results using the ultimatum game show that facial expressions have an impact on decision making as well as the feedback-related negativity following the offer. Furthermore, a moderating effect of sex on decision making was observed, with differential effects of facial expressions from male compared to female proposers. It is concluded that predictions of bargaining behavior must account for aspects of social interactions as well as sex effects to obtain more precise estimates of behavior.
A news report on the plight of a minority of American family farmers was manipulated to create versions differing in the degree of precision of general information (precise, imprecise) and in the use of exemplifying case histories (selective, blended, representative). Selective exemplification featured only histories of failing farms, representative exemplification a distribution of histories of failing and successful farms proportional to their actual occurrence. Respondents reported their own views concerning the farmers' plight either shortly after reading or after a delay of one or two weeks. The accuracy of estimates of failing farms was found to be highest for representative and lowest for selective exemplification—despite the availability of corrective general information. These effects were stable over time.
How are transformations in newswork intersecting with changes in the monitoring of reader behavior and new technologies of audience measurement? How, in short, are journalistic ‘visions of the audience’ shifting in the online era, and how are they enabling particular editorial practices? This article explores a provocative tension between the now common rhetorical invocation of the news audience as a ‘productive and generative’ entity, and the simultaneous, increasingly common institutional reduction of the audience to a quantifiable, rationalizable, largely consumptive aggregate. The first half of article reviews the literature on the relationship between audience understanding and newsroom practices. The second half of the article is comprised of an ethnographic analysis of the manner by which increasingly prominent and widespread techniques of audience measurement and quantification interact with the newsroom rhetoric of the active, generative audience. The article concludes with some thoughts regarding the role played by audience quantification and rationalization in shifting newswork practices. It argues that the underlying rhetoric of the active audience can be seen as laying the groundwork for a vision of the professional reporter that is less autonomous in his or her news decisions and increasingly reliant on audience metrics as a supplement to news judgment.
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
News professionalism is an efficient and effective means of controlling the working behavior of journalists. The norms of news professionalism determine legitimate arenas and news sources, and although journalists do not set out to report news so that the existing political and economic system is maintained, their norms end up producing stories that implicitly support the existing order. Furthermore, professional norms legitimize the existing order by making it appear to be a natural state of affairs. In addition to allowing news organizations to maximize audience size and maintain marketplace controls, news professionalism results in coverage that does not threaten the economic position of the organization or the overall system in which it operates. Since professionalism is independent of any one organization, journalists have a power base to use as a lever against management, and management limits potential conflict by establishing policies that further limit the professional behavior of journalists. The boundaries created by this interplay are broad enough to permit some creativity in reporting, editing, and presenting news stories, and narrow enough so that journalists must act in the interest of the news organization. (CRH)