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15.3: Media Effects

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    287335
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    Americans have long been suspicious of the influence news media have on the political attitudes and opinions of their audiences. Early scholars of political communication shared these suspicions. When the horrors the Holocaust came to light in the aftermath of World War II, many feared that the extent to which the German people seemed to have condoned the atrocities committed by their government proved the almighty power of propaganda to manipulate public opinion, and worried that similar messages could warp America’s democracy into a totalitarian regime like Nazi Germany.

    This theory of media effects, that people would blindly adopt whatever viewpoints the media projected onto them, was not supported by scientific evidence. Media experiments repeatedly failed to alter political attitudes, and the minor opinion changes they did manage to produce were generally short-lived. These studies quelled academics’ fears of a propaganda-driven descent into dictatorship, but they also raised another question: if Americans were so impervious to media effects, how could the media ever hope to inform them about the issues they were expected to understand as informed voters?

    Modern assessments of media effects have concluded that media do influence the attitudes and opinions of their audiences, primarily through a process called agenda setting. Covering a topic in the news increases its perceived importance, especially when the coverage is particularly prominent, lengthy, or repeated. The media-consuming public, in turn, become more likely to think about the topic in question, and to evaluate other political objects — such as the president’s job performance — with that topic in mind. One explanation for this effect is priming: seeing or hearing something in the news can increase its salience, just as seeing or hearing it from any other source would. Another explanation is that people are taking cues from their news media: if a topic is discussed on the news, someone must have thought it was important enough to discuss.


    15.3: Media Effects is shared under a not declared license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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