Search

Recent theorizing on deliberative democracy has put political listening at the core of meaningful democratic deliberation. In the present experiment (N  =   827), we investigated whether news media can improve diverse political listening in the United States via a reduction in party cue salience. Although Republican (Democratic) participants showed a strong preference for listening to speeches given by Republican (Democratic) politicians when party cues were highly salient, this bias in selective political listening was reduced or even absent when news items provided no or only low-salience cues. Conditional process analysis indicated that (automatically activated) implicit and (overtly expressed) explicit party attitudes mediated this effect. There are important implications: Current journalism practices tend to exacerbate tribal us-vs-them thinking by emphasizing partisan cues, nudging citizens toward not listening to political ideas from the other political camp. A more helpful news-choice architecture tones down partisan language, nudging citizens toward more diverse political listening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The media portray various social groups stereotypically, and studying the effects of these portrayals on prejudice is paramount. Yet, audience selectivity—inherent within today's high-choice media environments—has largely been disregarded. Relatedly, the predominance of forced-exposure designs is a source of concern. This article proposes the integration of audience selectivity into media stereotype effects research. Study 1 (N  =   1,166) indicated that prejudiced individuals tended to approach prejudice-consistent stereotypical news and avoid prejudice-challenging counter-stereotypical news. Using a forced-exposure experiment, study 2 (N  =   380) showed detrimental effects of prejudice-consistent news and beneficial effects of prejudice-challenging news. Relying on a self-selected exposure paradigm, study 3 (N  =   1,149) provided evidence for preference-based reinforcement. Study 4's "net-effect perspective" (N  =   937) indicated that operationalizing exposure as forced or self-selected can lead to different interpretations of actual societal effects. The findings emphasize the key role played by audience selectivity when studying media effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite much theorizing on the quality of journalism, there is limited actual empirical evidence for the effects of improved news quality on societal outcomes. This study provides such evidence for suicide reporting. News quality especially matters in this domain, as low-quality reporting can elicit "copycat" suicides (Werther effect). We developed and disseminated a web-based campaign promoting high-quality suicide reporting, targeting newsrooms in Germany. Twenty-two newsrooms participated. A content analysis (N  =   4,015 articles) provided supporting evidence for an increase in high-quality reporting (Study 1). Interrupted time series analyses offered tentative evidence for a reduction in actual suicides (Study 2). Acknowledging limitations in terms of causal interpretations, the findings support the claim that high-quality news can save lives. Similar newsroom interventions run elsewhere may contribute to preventing suicides globally. We discuss the implications, including those of a theoretically meaningful discovery related to the suicide-protective effect's underlying mechanism, termed the dampening-the-spikes hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media-related selection ( MRS) is an umbrella concept for selection processes such as gatekeeping by journalists, selective exposure by audience members, and news sharing by social network site ( SNS) users. Importantly, individual attitudes can influence MRS. Previous research on attitude-based MRS has relied almost exclusively on overtly expressed evaluations (i.e., explicit attitudes) as predictors of selection outcomes. We tested whether automatic affective evaluations (i.e., implicit attitudes) can predict MRS as well. In three studies (gatekeeping, selective exposure, and news sharing), we found that journalists', audience members', and SNS users' implicit and explicit attitudes predicted selection. Thus, attitudes may exert their influence even 'under the radar' of conscious awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current research draws a distinction between stereotype activation and application. Building on this differentiation, we present an implicit social cognition model of media priming: Implicit stereotypes (i.e., automatically activated stereotypes) are the outcome of associative processes, whereas explicit stereotypes (i.e., overtly expressed judgments) represent the outcome of propositional processes. We tested some of the model's basic predictions in an experiment. We found that a Gaussian distribution function explained the explicit media priming effect (i.e., decay in effect size at very high dose levels). However, a monotonic function explained the implicit media priming effect. This indicates that stereotypic content may impact implicit stereotypes even if the mass-mediated content is perceived as invalid. We discuss this finding regarding possible media-based reduction strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]