Media effects

Hypodermic needle modelMinimal effects modelUses and gratificationsAgenda-settingFramingPrimingSpiral of Silence

Hypodermic needle model

Working hypothesis of propaganda studies (1920s-1940s)

Regarding public as undifferentiated massVulnerable, because of its atomization, to outside

influencesMedia intending to (instrumentalised in order to)

doctrinateAssuming immediate persuasive effectsAnecdotical evidence

Did Randolph Hearst prompt the Spanish-American war in 1898?Did Stalinist propaganda work, or did Russians merely acquiesce

and resign to their fate under totalitarianism?

Limited effects model

Early empirical (survey) research into campaign and media effects (e.g. Berelson, Lazarsfeld & McPhee, The People’s Choice, 1954)

Finding remarkably weak informational and persuasive effects

Explanation:Avoidance of cognitive dissonance

Selective exposureSelective perceptionSelective retention

Limited effects or fugitive effects?

Uses and gratifications

Shifting focusFrom what the media do to the audience To what the audience do with the media

“The 'uses' approach assumes that people's values, their interests, their associations, their social rôles, are pre-potent, and that people selectively 'fashion' what they see and hear to these interests.” (Katz 1959)

Gans (1974) Popular Culture and High Culture Taste cultures Audience active and goal directed Audience use media Media compete with other sources of need satisfaction Audience self-conscious of interests and motives for media use Abandon value judgments about cultural significance of mass

communicationLevel of political interest is a matter of choice/taste not duty

Limitations of the “uses and gratifications” model

Coincides with claims (first emerging in the 1960s) that low levels of political interest and participation should not be regarded as a problem, but rather as indicator of stability, and public satisfaction with democracy (higher participation → polarization → instability)

Diversity of motivations for media use may undermine the “selective exposure” argument of the limited effects model

Individual (news) media selection can be based on non-political considerations (e.g. entertainment value)

In US, for example, talk radio, the Daily Show, or Wall Street journal consumed for entertainment/information reason

Resulting in exposure to biased political content with possible effects

Agenda-setting

Shift in focus From persuasive (directional) effects To cognitive effects

Press ”may not be successful … telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.” (Cohen, 1963)

Amount of news coverage afforded to a particular issue expected to determine public concern about that issue

Groundbreaking publications McCombs & Shaw (1972) “The Agenda-Setting Function of the Mass Media” Funkhouser (1972) “The Issues of the Sixties: An Exploratory Study in the

Dynamics of Public Opinion”

Assessing causality between media and public agendas Hierarchical vs. Longitudinal studies Controlling for real-world indicators Aggregate vs. individual-level studies Considering conditionality of effects Assessing Granger causality Assessing dynamics (optimal effect-spans and memory decay functions)

Framing

Framing sometimes defined as second-level agenda-setting First level: transmission of object salience Second level: transmission of attribute salience

Framing is indirect persuasion Direct persuasion concerns the altering of belief contents (convincing through

argument that e.g. a policy choice will produce a positive instead of a negative outcome)

Framing concerns the altering of importance that individuals attach to particular beliefs (convincing to support a certain policy by associating the policy measure with a particular value)

Media vs. Individual frames Media frames: making some aspects of perceived reality more salient, to

promote particular problem definitions, causal interpretations, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation

Individual frames: mentally stored clusters of ideas that guide processing of information

Causes and effects of framing Media frames as dependent variable

Influenced by social norms and values of journalists, organizational pressures and constraints, pressures of interest groups, journalistic routines, ideological or political orientations of journalists

Intentionality: ”authorities and pressure groups categorize beliefs in a way that marshals support and opposition to their interests” (Edelman)

Media frames as independent variable Influences on attitudes and opinions - through problem definition, attribution of

blame, indication of problem solution by the media Influences on individual frames – overlapping frames, but different weights

attached: ”what was central to the media might be rather peripheral to most repondents” (Huang)

Individual frames as dependent variable Thematic vs. episodic media framing affects attribution of responsibility,

dependent on general salience of issues Conflict, human interest, or conflict frames tend to activate different cognitive

processes in the audience

Individual frames as independent variable Linking audience frames with patterns of political action and participation Audiences may process media stories either in terms of diagnostic, prognostic,

or motivational framing; first two imply attribution of blame and responsibility, and expectations about future policy, hence asserting passivity in audiences

Priming

Priming, a close relative to framing, reintroduces the notion of persuasive media effects Concerned with the consequences of setting the public agenda

Experimental studies (Iyengar and Kinder, 1983)Persuasive effects on beliefs, attitudes and choicesPlacing issues or values high on the public agenda makes these salient, i.e.

important, problematic, easily retrievableSalient issues serve as criteria for evaluating leaders, performances,

political processes “It is difficult to change people’s preferences; it is easier to affect the priorities

or weights they give to subpreferences bearing on the central decision. A voter may assess the political situation from several standpoints; from one, the Democrats appear better to him and, from another, the Republicans do. His decision is likely to follow the aspect given greater weight by him – with no change in the substance of his own opinions. Thus the voter’s feeling about what is critical in the political situation enables him to find a way out of a potential ‘conflict’ over the issues and hence facilitates political integration within the individual.” (Berelson, Lazarsfeld and McPhee, The People’s Choice, 1954)

Spiral of silence

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann Public, opinion, sanction and punishment

”to the individual, not isolating himself is more important than his own judgment”

Indidividual observes environment to assess distribution of opinions The stronger he finds his opinion present and reinforced by the

environment, the more confident and outspoken he will be Public opinion understood as amalgam that compels consent

Role of media It is not the actual but the apparent, publicly visible strength of opinions

that the individual assesses Spiral of silence a dynamic model of public opinion formation Prevalence of opinions in the media key variable in explaining the

likelihood that an individual will speak his mind, be silent, or change his mind