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COVID-19 is a news issue that can be covered from many different angles. When reporting, journalists have to select, accentuate, or exclude particular aspects, which, in turn, may evoke a specific, and possibly constricted, perspective in viewers, a phenomenon termed the news-framing effect. Guided by the reinforcing spiral framework, we conducted a multi-study project that investigated the news-framing effect's underlying mechanism by studying the dynamic of self-reinforcing effects. Grounded in a real-life framing environment observed during the pandemic and systematically assessed via a content analysis (study 1) and survey (study 2), we offer supporting evidence for a preference-based reinforcement model by utilizing a combination of the selective exposure (i.e., self-selected exposure) and causal effects (i.e., forced exposure) paradigms within one randomized controlled study (study 3). Self-selection of news content by viewers was a necessary precondition for frame-consistent (reinforcement) effects. Forced exposure did not elicit causal effects in a frame-consistent direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tests were performed to learn whether exposure to news about crimes committed by dark-skinned criminals increases impulsive facial-threat perceptions of meeting dark-skinned strangers in a subsequent situation (media-priming hypothesis), but only when the facial displays are ambiguous (ambiguity hypothesis). The assumption is that news stereotypes prime the “dark-skinned criminal” stereotype, which, in turn, influences subsequent face processing. An experiment with two groups was used to test this prediction. Participants allocated to the treatment group (n = 53) read about crimes committed by dark-skinned criminals. In contrast, for the control group (n = 52), cues indicating skin color were not mentioned at all. As predicted, the treatment increased the perceived facial threat of dark-skinned strangers, but only when the facial displays were ambiguous. Given the importance of the face in social interaction, I discuss important, real-world implications for recipients as well as for journalists and media organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a dose-response (DR) account of media priming. DR concepts describe the relationship between a dose and the elicited response and, thus, allow us to study dose-dependent media priming effects. We report empirical evidence from an experiment (N = 351) for the DR relationship between exposure to stereotypic newspaper content and readers’ stereotypic social reality estimates. We investigated the change in the media priming effect size by utilizing nine experimentally manipulated dose-conditions (i.e., frequency of the media prime). The empirical data appeared in the form of a Gaussian distribution function: We were able to document (1) a threshold dose, which generally allows us to specify the acceptable daily intake of potentially harmful media content. Furthermore, (2) we found a decline in the effect size at very high dose levels. We argue that a DR account as a supplement to contemporary approaches can be beneficial for media priming research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]