15.4: Media Effects

Americans have long been suspicious of media’s influence on their audiences. Early scholars of political communication shared these suspicions, especially when the horrors the Holocaust came to light after World War II. Many feared that the extent to which the German public seemed to have condoned atrocities proved the power of propaganda to manipulate public opinion. They worried that similar messages could likewise warp America’s democracy into a totalitarian regime.

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 produce were generally short-lived. These studies quelled scholars’ fears of hyper-effective propaganda. They also raised another question: if Americans were so impervious to media effects, how could media inform them about the issues they were expected to understand as citizens and voters?

Modern assessments of media effects have concluded that media do influence their audiences, primarily through agenda setting. Covering a topic in the news increases its perceived importance, especially when the coverage is particularly prominent, lengthy, or repeated. News consumers, in turn, become more likely to think about the topic, and to consider it when evaluating other political objects, such as the president’s job performance. One explanation for this effect is priming: just seeing or hearing something in the news can increase its salience. Another is that people take cues from news media: if a topic is discussed on the news, someone must have thought it was important enough to discuss.

In the context of agenda setting, timing is crucial. Candidates and their campaigns live in rightful fear of the dreaded “October surprise,” a news story that breaks right before Election Day and casts them in a bad light. A story that might have been easily debunked, rebutted, or simply forgotten about had it cropped up a month or two earlier could dramatically alter the race by being fresh in voters’ minds when they cast their ballots.

The 2016 presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton featured dueling October surprises. On October 7, the Washington Post published an 11-year-old clip from the television show Access Hollywood showing Trump making lewd comments and acting dismissive about sexual assault. Three weeks later, the FBI announced it was looking into newly discovered emails sent by Clinton to determine whether she had divulged classified information in them. Some analysts blamed Clinton’s narrow loss to Trump on the FBI’s announcement, which may have led voters to focus more on Clinton’s carelessness than on Trump’s crassness in the campaign’s final week.