Our audience receive and process messages and information in different ways. The information we send affects people in some way. Researchers have been looking at how mass media affect people for many decades. Research about media effects are ongoing, and new models are developed constantly, while others are discredited. The discussion below is a brief overview of three of the most well-known media effects models, followed by a discussion of two models that still relate strongly to journalism.
In the 20th century, there was a view that the mass media had the ability to mesmerise, influence and even control its audiences. Then new communication technology in the form of moving pictures, the gramophone and radio expanded the mass media previously occupied by newspapers. It might be argued that the First World War was also the first war fought using the media. During a period when public opinion became crucial, the media was used to drum up morale and support, and Britain even established a Ministry of Information to produce the necessary propaganda. The Russians, Germans, Italians, and Spaniards deployed similar methods of mass persuasion. In the intervening years between the two World Wars (1918– 1939), this ability of their leaders to seemingly “brainwash” citizens using the media was explained using the hypodermic needle model (also known as the magic bullet) model. In the hypodermic needle model, the audience were seen as passive recipients ofwhatever message was injected (or shot like a bullet) by the media. The understanding was that the audience could be manipulated to react in a predictable, unthinking and conditioned manner, because they would simply believe anything the mass media said.
The classic case study cited to support this view is the famous radio broadcast of The War of the worlds by Orson Welles on Halloween of 1938. In this episode of a radio drama series aired by Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in the US, the programme was “interrupted” by an urgent announcement of a Martian invasion in progress.
The radio drama The War of the Worlds sparked panic across the United States when it was broadcast in 1938, with many people believing an invasion of Earth by Martian was real.
The realistic portrayal of the story had purportedly sparked widespread panic throughout the country, because people apparently believed Martian really invaded Earth. This was taken by some scholars as proof that the media had the power to control audiences. However, the lack of empirical studies led some scholars to question this model; there was no real proof that many people actually did panic and believe there was a Martian invasion.
Towards the end of the Second World War, sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld added to the media effects research field the social aspect of human agency (this means that humans make their own decisions; they do not just believe everything they hear).
Rejecting the direct influence of the hypodermic needle or magic bullet theory, Lazarsfeld introduced an intermediary between the sender of a message and the audience. This intermediary, dubbed an “opinion leader”, was usually a person of influence with greater access to information. They would be seen as an authority able to filter, interpret and explain media messages. This is called the two-step flow model. It is the credibility of the weatherman that persuades the individual to bring along an umbrella rather than the factual data from the meteorological department themselves. Also, it would be the community or religious leader expounding on the messages released by politicians that actually hold sway over the public.
Another great example to explain the influence of opinion leaders is the world of fashion. Magazines play an important role in showing the trends of the coming season by passing on information from big fashion brands to a wider audience. The reader’s knowledge of next season’s fashions and trends is filtered by the magazines. While this describes a classic two step flow of communication, new technologies have changed the role of the media.
In the digital age, new opinion leaders, such as fashion bloggers and influencers on Instagram or TikTok, now influence people’s opinions. In many ways, Instagrammers and TikTok producers are now the people setting the trends, not necessarily magazines or newspapers. Many influencers make a lot of money through strategic product placement or endorsement in their posts or videos.
A more radical shift in focus was to move away from what impact the media has on audiences towards investigating why or how audiences react to the media. Based on the assumption that audiences are not passive or powerless but instead exercise choice, researchers developed the uses and gratifications model.
This model sees audiences as active seekers of media that best fulfil their needs or that reinforce their existing beliefs and interests. This is something that has become very clear in the age of social media bubbles; many people only follow people whose opinion they agree with, because they feel good when they read the messages sent by these people, and it is satisfying for the audience to agree with what their idols say.
The importance of this model is largely that it dismisses the idea of the media as able to change people’s opinions. What it does is reinforce the status quo, where the media is satisfying audience needs and desires. For example, if you use social media to satisfy your need, you are using the internet as a way to be entertained and to connect with your friends. Researchers have identified a number of common motives for media consumption. These include relaxation, social interaction, entertainment, arousal, escape, and a host of interpersonal and social needs.
Media effects and journalism
The media can and do have a strong effect on what people think about. By highlighting certain events repeatedly, they create a sense of urgency about those issues even though this is not always an accurate reflection of reality. There are two important media effects models that attempt to explain how journalism affects people and society, namely agenda-setting and framing.
The media always select certain highlights from all the many things that happen around us every day and then only report on these things they have selected. The criteria for the selection depend greatly on the ideology of the media editors and their own business or personal interests. By highlighting certain events, an uncritical audience might think the reality presented by a certain publication or television station is the only important event at that time. One example is the royal wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton, which mesmerised the world, including parts of the world that have no connection to the British monarchy. This is what we call agenda-setting. The mass media have the power to decide what they publish or broadcast, and this influences what people think about, what people think are the important issues of the day. The agenda-setting theory was formally developed by McCombs and Shaw (1972) when they studied the US Presidential Election of 1968. Their analysis of the news and media coverage revealed that constant coverage of the election influenced the opinions of voters about the election.
Agenda-setting happens through a process of gatekeeping. This means the mass media affect or control the information that is transmitted to their audiences. There are four gatekeeping functions: relaying, limiting, expanding, and reinterpreting (Bittner, 1996). Relaying is the gatekeeping function of transmitting a message, sending it somehow, which usually requires technology and equipment that the media outlet controls and has access to, but we do not. Limiting means media outlets decide whether to pass something along to the media channel so it can be relayed. This means the media decide which message to transmit. This is not necessarily bad, because the media select messages that will appeal to their audience, and as we discussed above, it is important to satisfy the needs of the audience. Gatekeepers also expand messages. For example, a blogger may take a story from a more traditional news source and fact-check it or do additional research, interview additional sources, and post it on their blog. In this case, expanding helps us get more information than we would otherwise so we can be better informed. Lastly, gatekeepers function to reinterpret mass media messages. Reinterpretation is useful when gatekeepers change a message from something too complex or foreign for us to understand into something meaningful. For example, when the Government makes a new law about land expropriation, it might be written in very technical language. The media will help explain what the law means.
Related to agenda-setting is framing. The mass media tell stories in certain ways. Framing is when messages are created and distributed in such a way as to highlight, emphasise or hide some aspects of the message over others. We can do this through language via how we organise and structure information. Framing is about how the media present a certain story to an audience. For example, the Ukraine war in 2022. Many critics in non-Western countries criticised the Western media for highlighting the horrors of the Ukraine war because white people were involved, while neglecting other wars in other countries that were just as serious. This is framing – the story is told in such a way that the war in Ukraine is made to sound more important than any other war because Europeans are involved.2
Reference
The audience and media effects sections above are based on and adapted from a framework used by Media Texthack Group. 2014. Media Studies 101 – A Creative Commons Textbook. Available at: https://mediatexthack.wordpress.com/[June 30, 2021], CC-BY.
