Mass Media Effects II

Readings:

Return to the Concept of Powerful Mass Media

This is the title of an article published by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann in 1973 in the journal Studies of Broadcasting. Noelle-Neumann, the controversial German scholar we study in depth in the learning unit dedicated to the phenomenon of public opinion, tried to reverse the hypothesis that mass media can only have a limited influence on their audiences.

In this learning unit, you can find some theories that explain less obvious effects of mass communication. Some of theories refer to the more or less subtle influence of the mass media on how we perceive the world around us (the cognitive paradigm). Other theories focus on the persuasive effects (the persuasion paradigm), meaning, how the media affect our opinion, values, beliefs or even behaviors.

Cognitive Paradigm

Gate-Keeping Effect

Kurt Lewin established the concept of GATE-KEEPING to describe the flow of information in mass communication

In this context, a gatekeeper is any individual or organization that has power over that flow of information, that can control what is going to be released to the public.
In mass communication we find whole networks of gatekeepers. Let’s say that you are working as a free lance PR writer. You produce a press release and send it to a newspaper. The assistant editor will first read your release. If this gatekeeper accepts it, it will go to the next step: the senior editor of this section of the newspaper. Still, whether the piece will be published or not, will be decided by the editor-in-chief. Whatever reaches the public needs to go through a series of filters. And of course, an important amount of information is filtered out in the process (for instance, only 20% of the press releases produced by PR departments and firms are finally published).

Agenda Setting/Building

Closely related to the Gate-Keeping theory – or as a consequence of this theory – the mass communication scholars Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw revealed in the 1970ies the so-called AGENDA-SETTING EFFECT OF MASS MEDIA

The agenda setting approach is a response to the selective exposure theory.

Even if the media cannot determine what we think because we tend to avoid those messages that are in contradiction with our beliefs, McCombs and Shaw proved that they can surely determine what we think about.
They select from the complex reality a couple of subjects.
And with this selection, they can determine what we are going to worry about, what we are going to talk and to discuss about, which topic we are going to have an opinion on. This is what we call news.

Whatever is not in the media will never get into our awareness. It simply does not exist for us. In this way, mass media shape how we perceive the reality.

Conceptually, the agenda setting theory goes back to Walter Lippmann vision of the problematic relationship between truth and news. It opened a new way of research. Up to that point, Mass Media effects research have been focusing on the so-called “persuasion paradigm”, i.e. how mass media might directly influence our opinions, values or beliefs. The agenda setting paradigm represents an epistemological shift from the “persuasion” to the “cognitive paradigm”, i.e. how mass media determine the way we perceive and deal with the reality.

Click here to read more about this topic: persuasive vs. cognitive paradigm

Click here to read the original Chapel Study by McCombs and Shaw.

Pseudo-Events

The Historian Daniel Boorstin created the term PSEUDO-EVENT in his classic book “The Image” (1961) to refer to those events that have been synthetically created and staged with the main purpose of been reported in mass media. Examples of pseudo-events are press conferences, personal appearances, awards ceremonies, electoral debates, or even the super-bowl. Almost 70% of what is reported in the media is the result of any kind of pseudo-event.

According to Boorstin, the main characteristics of Pseudo-Events are:

It is not spontaneous, but comes about because someone has planned, planted, or incited it. Typically, it is not a train wreck or an earthquake, but an interview.
It is planted primarily (not always exclusively) for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced. Therefore, its occurrence is arranged for the convenience of the reporting or reproducing media. Its success is measured by how widely it is reported. Time relations in it are commonly fictitious or factitious; the announcement is given out in advance “for future release” and written as if the event had occurred in the past. The question, “Is it real?” is less important than, “Is it newsworthy?”
Its relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous. Its interest arises largely from this very ambiguity. Concerning a pseudo-event the question, “What does it mean?” has a new dimension. While the news interest in a train wreck is in what happened and in the real consequences, the interest in an interview is always, in a sense, in whether it really happened and in what might have been the motives. Did the statement really mean what it said? Without some of this ambiguity a pseudo-event cannot be very interesting.
Usually it is intended to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. The hotel’s thirtieth-anniversary celebration, by saying that the hotel is a distinguished institution, actually makes it one.

Daniel Boorstin’s book was prophetic. The author was able to foresee that pseudo-events will become increasingly relevant in the mass communication society. Nowadays almost 70 % of the news we get from the different media (newspapers, magazines, TV or radio stations) is the result of some kind of pseudo-event.

Boorstin also explained the reasons why pseudo-events are overshadowing spontaneous events in the media.

Pseudo-events are more dramatic. A television debate between candidates can be planned to be more suspenseful (for example, by reserving questions which are then popped suddenly) than a casual encounter or consecutive formal speeches planned by each separately.
Pseudo-events, being planned for dissemination, are easier to disseminate and to make vivid. Participants are selected for their newsworthy and dramatic interest.
Pseudo-events can be repeated at will, and thus their impression can be re-enforced.
Pseudo-events cost money to create; hence somebody has an interest in disseminating, magnifying, advertising, and extolling them as events worth watching or worth believing. They are therefore advertised in advance, and rerun in order to get money’s worth.
Pseudo-events, are easy to understand. Being planned for intelligibility, are more intelligible and hence more reassuring. Even if we cannot discuss intelligently the qualifications of the candidates or the complicated issues, we can at least judge the effectiveness of a television performance. How comforting to have some political matter we can grasp!
Pseudo-events are more sociable, more conversable, and more convenient to witness. Their occurrence is planned for our convenience. The Sunday newspaper appears when we have a lazy morning for it. Television programs appear when we are ready with our glass of beer. In the office the next morning Jack Paar’s (or any other star performer’s) regular late-night show at the usual hour will overshadow in conversation a casual event that suddenly came up and had to find its way into the news.
Knowledge of pseudo-events, – of what has been reported, or what has been staged, and how- becomes the test of being “informed.” News magazines provide us regularly with quiz questions concerning not what has happened but concerning “names m the news”–what has been reported in the news magazines.
Finally, pseudo-events spawn other pseudo-events in geometric progression. They dominate our consciousness simply because there are more of them, and even more.

Framing

Generally, the concept of framing is used in combination with the agenda setting effect of mass media.

Framing refers to the way we perceive the reality around us. We use pre-established cognitive structures in order to organize sensorial stimuli and the information we are exposed to. Those pre-existing cognitive structures, which Leon Festinger called schemata, are not neutral. They imply a judgment on people, situations, or actions. Such “frames” facilitate the immense task of making sense of the world.

When framing news, we are not only providing our target audience with information, but also giving them the necessary clues to interpret the events we are reporting. The capacity of framing issues gives media and journalists the power of determining (or at least influencing) how the audience will perceive those issues.

Example of framing: When reporting about an extramarital affair of one political candidate, you can use different frames to approach the issue: adultery, romantic love, sexual freedom. Every one of those frames will imply a different moral judgment of the action.

Click here to learn more about the two methodological approaches to investigate framing: Frame Building vs. Frame Setting

Cultivation Effect

George Gerbner and associates discovered in the early 1970s the CULTIVATION EFFECT of mass media.

This theory goes a step forward regarding other theories.

It says that our perception of the reality is determined by our Media Use. The more we watch TV, The more we think that the reality is like what we see on the screen. Heavy Media users, for example, overrate the violence in our society, even if they never were victims of violence themselves. They think that the percentage of Doctors and Policemen is much bigger than in reality, because Doctors and Policemen are over-represented in TV and movies.
Or that there are much more cases of adultery than in reality.
One of the consequences of the cultivation effect of mass media is what Gerbner called “Mean World Syndrome”. Since bad news are overrepresented in the media, and since violence plays also an essential role in movies and TV shows, people tend to believe that the world is a much more violent and evil place to live than it is in reality.

Persuasion Paradigm

Priming

Priming is related to two of the theories discussed in the cognitive paradigm: agenda setting and framing. One of the meanings of the verb to prime is to prepare someone for a particular situation, to provide this person with the knowledge or the necessary tools to evaluate that situation.

The priming effect of mass media refers to preparing the audience with evaluations criteria that would influence the way they judge media contents. It can refer to specific values (democracy is good, violence is bad, Islam is radical, immigrants are a danger, …) that might determine our judgement on news that relate to political regimes (democratic or non-democratic), Islam or immigrants. Still, it also affects communication best practices, such us the reliability of news sources or the criteria to determine what a trustworthy communicator should look like.This theoretical framework was developed during the 1980s by Iyengar, Peters, and Kender. It is still used in the study of political communication campaigns, for instance, the pre-learned criteria used by voters to evaluate political candidates.

Another important theoretical framework in the research of Mass-Media Effects is the so-called SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY, developed by Albert Bandura and associates.

The main statement of this theory is that we learn how to act in private and public settings observing the behavior of the people in movies or TV. The process is known as modeling (or imitation). Modeling goes throughout one’s lifetime, but it is especially important during the formative years of childhood. Bandura et al. showed that, for instance, the more stars smoke on the screen, the more popular smoking became among the population.

It is interesting, in this regard, to compare the screen behavior of the 1940ies and 50ies on the screen (Humphrey Bogart is the best example) with the behavior of contemporary Hollywood icons.

Instrumental Reporting

Instrumental use of news, or instrumental news pick (Instrumentelle Aktualisierung), is a term developed by the German media theorist Hans-Mathias Kepplinger.

According to this author, journalists decide which are the events that will become news based on their conscious or subconscious ideological biases. Such biases also play a role in the weigh that the news may receive in the different media outlets. Again, the decision on the relevance will be directly proportional to the potential benefit or harm that those events or stories may have for a particular ideological or political position. The decision whether to highlight an event or issue, to publish it in the front page, or to play it down and hide it in the inner section of the newspaper, is determined by the political capital that media professionals expect to extract from its publication.

This important theoretical approach has not received enough media attention in the U.S. Still, it is particularly interesting in contemporary political communication. Political actors and organizations tend to approach issues as though they own them. Media outlets, depending on their ideological biases, decide to publish or emphasize events or issues that support their ideological agendas. In liberal media, for instance, we find more news related to the issue of climate, while conservative ones tend to emphasize stories that deal with immigration crises or violent crimes.

Spiral of Silence

To understand the depth of the power of mass media, it is necessary to explain Noelle-Neumann’s main theory: the Spiral of Silence. The author revealed how mass media might influence political power influencing dynamics of public opinion.

I have dedicated one page in this Web-site to Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann in this learning unit.

The link to this page.