Who accepts the news?: news coverage of presidential campaigns, voters' information processing ability, and media effects susceptibility
Year: 2004
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This dissertation examines the influence of news coverage of presidential \ncampaigns on voters’ perception and decision-making about the campaigns and their \npresidential candidates. In addition, voters’ agenda setting and attribute priming \nsusceptibilities to campaign coverage was scrutinized for their relationship with one \nof the most researched variables in political psychology—information processing \nability. First, from the perspective of the large media effects model, this study looked \nat what campaign issues salient in news stories were also important to voters (agenda \nsetting effect) and how the descriptions about presidential candidates in the news \naffected voters’ criteria for candidate choice (attribute priming effect). Second, this \nstudy hypothesized that despite their strong influence on voters’ perception and \njudgment, they will have different impacts on the voters with different processing \nabilities. A nonlinear model of media effectiveness in political communication was \ndeveloped to test such a curvilinear relationship between media effects susceptibility \nand information processing ability. For these purposes, this study conducted \ncomprehensive content analyses of network television newscasts and survey data \nanalyses of the National Election Studies to compare news content and public \nopinion regarding the 1992 and 2000 presidential elections. \nThis study found remarkably strong correlations between campaign issues in \nthe news and voters’ national agendas, and between the news descriptions of the \npresidential candidates and voters’ criteria for candidate choice. Concerning the \nnonlinearity, this study found an inverted U-shaped relationship between media \neffects susceptibility and information processing ability, which suggests that voters \nwith moderate processing ability are most susceptible to media effects. The results \nimply that news coverage of presidential campaigns have significant influence on \nvoters’ perception about nationally important issues and their image and judgments \nabout the presidential candidates. The finding of a nonlinear relationship between \nsusceptibility and processing ability contributes to the settlement of a long \ncontroversy on the inconsistent linear relationship between the two variables. This \nnonlinearity suggests that processing ability is positively correlated with media \nexposure, but not necessarily with accepting media messages. Consequently, from \nboth theoretical and methodological perspectives, this dissertation suggests a need \nfor more rigorous research designs involving nonlinearity and nonadditivity to \ncorrectly understand complex media effects.
Author: Ha Sungtae
Language: English
Subfield: Communication
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2132877592