IX.    Media Effects I: Direct Effects

1.       Overview: Shanto Iyengar and Adam Simon. 2000. “New Perspectives and Evidence on Political Communication and Campaign Effects.” Annual Rev. of Psychology, 51:149-169.

2.       Shanto Iyengar; Mark D. Peters; Donald R. Kinder. 1982. Experimental Demonstrations of the "Not-So-Minimal" Consequences of Television News Programs. The American Political Science Review, Vol. 76, No. 4. (Dec., 1982), pp. 848-858. (skim)

3.       Diana Mutz and Byron Reeves. 2005. “The New Videomalaise: Effects of Televised Incivility on Political Trust.” American Political Science Review, Volume 99, Issue 01, February 2005, pp 1-15.

4.        RÜDIGER SCHMITT-BECK. “Mass Communication, Personal Communication and Vote Choice: The Filter Hypothesis of Media Influence in Comparative Perspective.” British Journal of Political Science, Volume 33, Issue 02, April 2003, pp 233-259

5.       CHAPPELL LAWSON and JAMES A. McCANN. “Television News, Mexico's 2000 Elections and Media Effects in Emerging Democracies.” British Journal of Political Science, 2004, 35: 1-30.

6.       Steve Kull, et al. 2003. “Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War.” Political Science Quarterly, Volume 118 · Number 4 · Winter 2003-2004. (skim)

 

 

Discussion Questions for Media Effects

Iyengar and Simon:

1)       According to Iyengar and Simon, why is the conventional wisdom in the study of political communication wrong? Although Iyengar and Simon’s focus is on the impact of political ads, can we generalize their argument to the impact of media effects in general? What kinds of media effects should political scientists study and with what methods, according to Iyengar and Simon? How do the Resonance and Strategic Models differ from the Hypodermic model of old?

2)       How powerful are media effects and how have different models of media effects answered this question differently over the years?

3)       How did early research define “media effects” narrowly? Why is it a mistake to draw inferences about the power of media messages from the study of presidential campaigns?

4)       How might we expand on the authors’ “resonance” and “strategic” models of campaign effects? Can we apply these models to other, non-electoral contexts?

 

Subtle media effects:

1)       Define framing, agenda setting, and priming and distinguish them from persuasion. Give examples of each in Iraq war coverage and its effects.

2)       Why does there seem to be so much conceptual confusion about these subtle effects?  

3)        Following Druckman, distinguish between frames and framing effects, equivalency framing and emphasis or issue framing.

4)       Under what conditions are framing effects more limited, according to Druckman and colleagues. What implications does this have for explanations of media effects and for elite manipulation and the competence of  citizens?

5)       What are agenda-setting and priming and how do political scientists define these terms differently than psychologists and communication scholars? 

6)       What’s new about Miller and Krosnick’s study of agenda setting and priming?

7)       In what way are agenda setting, priming and framing alike?

8)       In what ways do the psychological processes that mediate these effects matter, both normatively and empirically? 

 

Mutz & Reeves

1)       Television news portrayals of politics has been linked in a myriad ways to declining political trust. How do Mutz and Reeves hypothesize this happens?

2)       Do you buy the authors’ argument that an experimental design is necessary to test their hypothesis?

3)       What is the authors’ explanation for the relationship between uncivil TV portrayals and declining trust in their experiments, how does it differ from others’ explanations, and how convincing is their evidence? What additional evidence is necessary to make their case more strongly?

4)       What, if anything, can be done about this sad state of affairs?

5)       How would you like to see future studies extend this line of research?   

 

SCHMITT-BECK

1)       Why use a comparative design to test the “filter” hypothesis?

2)       Do you agree with the author’s statement that:

“If measures of media exposure, controlling for political predispositions, reveal statistically significant effects on voting decisions, indicating that the likelihood of preferring a particular party or candidate varied with the amount of information respondents’ received from particular media, it can be concluded that these media exerted a positive or negative influence on the vote.”

3)       How did the author end up with the graph showing massive slant in the U.S. news when content analyses show much more balance?

4)       Generally speaking, how would you critique the use of cross-sectional data to study media influence, even if we know the slant of an individual’s news source?

 

LAWSON & McCANN

1)       Why is it a mistake to apply the “minimal effects” model outside the U.S. and Western Europe? How generalizable are the authors’ results to other countries and conditions?

2)       How does panel data help to discern media influence from other sources of variation in candidate support? How is it limited?

3)        “All told, these results demonstrate that television coverage had substantial and significant effects on attitudes towards the main candidates in Mexico’s 2000 presidential race?”

4)       Are you satisfied with the authors’ various tests for the robustness of their findings and attempts to dismiss alternative causal explanations for their findings?

a)       Note: the attempt to deal with endogeneity (candidate differential à news exposure) uses lagged (t-1) measures of news selection to create “instruments” of current (time t) news exposure.

5)       What general lessons about the study of media effects do you take with you from the survey studies?