The Effects of Dramatized Political News on Public Opinion
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15763/issn.2374-7781.2004.25.0.321-343Abstract
Today’s American political news environment is more fragmented than ever before. In order to attract a larger audience, many political news reporters, editors, and producers work to create a product that is not only informative, but also entertaining and compelling. A popular method of achieving this goal is to dramatize news coverage of politics. While the goal of dramatizing the news is to entertain, previous research has discussed a number of possible side effects. Empirical evidence on this subject, however, is seriously lacking. Using a controlled laboratory experiment, this article analyzes the effect of dramatically embellished news on public opinion. The results indicate that, although entertaining for some, dramatically embellished political news has some negative effects on larger political attitudes, including overall support for political leaders and trust in the news media.References
Altheide, David L. 1974. Creating Reality: How TV News Distorts Events. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
Ansolabehere, Steven, and Shanto Iyengar. 1995. Going Negative: How Political Advertisements Shrink & Polarize the Electorate. New York: Free Press.
Barker, David C. 2002. Rushed to Judgment: Talk Radio, Persuasion, and American Political Behavior. New York: Columbia University Press.
Baum, Matthew A. 2003a. Soft News Goes to War: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy in the New Media Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Baum, Matthew A. 2003b. Soft News and Political Knowledge: Evidence of Absence or Absence of Evidence? Political Communication 20:173-90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10584600390211181
Baum, Matthew A. 2002. Sex, Lies, and War: How Soft News Brings Foreign Policy to the Inattentive Public. American Political Science Review 96:91-109. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0003055402004252
Bennett, Lance W. 2005. News: The Politics of Illusion, 6th ed. New York: Longman.
Campbell, Donald T., and Julian C. Stanley. 1963. Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research. Chicago: R. McNally.
Cappella, Joseph N., and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. 1997. Spiral of Cynicism: The Press and the Public Good. New York: Oxford University Press.
Cook, Timothy E. 1998. Governing with the News: The News Media as a Political Institution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dautrich, Kenneth, and Thomas H. Hartley. 1999. How the News Media Fail American Voters: Causes, Consequences, and Remedies. New York: Columbia University Press.
Davis, Richard, and Diana Owen. 1998. The New Media and American Politics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Delli Carpini, Michael X., and Bruce A. Williams. 2001. Let us Infotain You: Politics in the New Media Environment. In Mediated Politics: Communication and the Future of Democracy, eds. Bennet and Entman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Epstein, Edward J. 1973. News from Nowhere. New York: Random House.
Erber, Ralph, and Richard R. Lau. 1990. Political Cynicism Revisited: An Information Processing Reconciliation of Policy-Based and Incumbent-Based Interpretations of Changes in Trust in Government. American Journal of Political Science 34:236-253. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2111517
Fallows, James. 1996. Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy. New York: Pantheon Books.
Forgette, Richard, and Jonathan S. Morris. 2004. The Effects of New Media Coverage on Institutional Evaluations. Presented at the annual meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, New Orleans.
Fox, Richard L., and Robert W. Van Sickel. 2001. Tabloid Justice: Criminal Justice in an Age of Media Frenzy. Boulder, CO: Rienner Press.
Gans, Herbert J. 1980. Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time. New York: Vintage Books.
Hovind, Mark B. 1999. The Melodramatic Imperative: Television's Model for Presidential Election Coverage. In The Electronic Election: Perspectives on the 1996 Campaign Communication, eds. Lynda Lee Kaid and Dianne G. Bystrom. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Iyengar, Shanto, and Donald R. Kinder. 1987. News that Matters: Television and American Opinion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kinder, Donald R., and Thomas R. Palfrey, eds. 1993. Experimental Foundations of Political Science. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Lenart, Silvo, and Kathleen M. McGraw. 1989. America Watches 'Amerika': Television Docudrama and Political Attitudes. Journal of Politics 51:697-712. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2131502
Mann, Thomas, and Norman Ornstein, eds. 1994. Congress, the Press, and the Public. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution.
Morris, Jonathan S. 2002. The New Media and the Dramatization of American Politics. Ph.D. diss. Purdue University.
Morris, Jonathan S., and Marie Witting. 2001. Congressional Partisanship, Bipartisanship, and Public Opinion: An Experimental Analysis. Politics and Policy 29:47-67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2001.tb00583.x
Mutz, Diana C., and R. Andrew Holbrook. 2003. Televised Political Conflict: Nemesis or Necessity? Presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago.
Niemi, Richard G., Stephen C. Craig, and Franco Mattei. 1991. Measuring Internal Political Efficacy in the 1988 National Election Study. The American Political Science Review 85:1407-13. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1963953
Nimmo, D., and J.E. Combs. 1990. Mediated Political Realities 2d ed. New York: Long-man.
Paletz, David L. 2002. The Media and American Politics, 2d ed. New York: Longman
Paletz, David L., and Robert M. Entman. 1981. Media Power in Politics. New York: Free Press.
Patterson, Thomas E. 1993. Out of Order. New York: Vintage Books.
Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. 2004. News Audiences Increasingly Politicized. Release Date June 8, 2004. Available at http://people-press.org/reports/ display.php3?ReportID=215.
Prior, Markus. 2003. Any Good News in Soft News? The Impact of Soft News Preference on Political Knowledge. Political Communication 20:149-171. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10584600390211172
Ridout, Christine F. 1993. News Coverage and Talk Shows in the 1992 Presidential Campaign. PS: Political Science and Politics 26:712-716. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1049096500038993 http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/419536
Rozell, Mark. 1994. Press Coverage of Congress, 1946-1992. In Congress, the Press, and the Public, eds. Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution.
Rozell, Mark. 1996. In Contempt of Congress: Postwar Press Coverage on Capitol Hill. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Sparrow, Bartholomew H. 1999. Uncertain Guardians: The News Media as a Political Institution. New York: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
West, Darrell M. 2001. The Rise and Fall of the Media Establishment. Boston: St. Martin's Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-07405-8
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with American Review of Politics agree to the following terms:
The Author retains copyright in the Work, where the term “Work” shall include all digital objects that may result in subsequent electronic publication or distribution.
Upon acceptance of the Work, the author shall grant to the Publisher the right of first publication of the Work.
The Author shall grant to the Publisher and its agents the nonexclusive perpetual right and license to publish, archive, and make accessible the Work in whole or in part in all forms of media now or hereafter known under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License or its equivalent, which, for the avoidance of doubt, allows others to copy, distribute, and transmit the Work under the following conditions:
Attribution: other users must attribute the Work in the manner specified by the author as indicated on the journal Web site;
Non-Commercial: the materials may not be used for commercial purposes;
Share Alike: If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
with the understanding that the above condition can be waived with permission from the Author and that where the Work or any of its elements is in the public domain under applicable law, that status is in no way affected by the license.
The Author is able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the nonexclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the Work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), as long as there is provided in the document an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
Authors are permitted and encouraged to post online a pre-publication manuscript (but not the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version of the Work) in institutional repositories or on their Websites prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (see The Effect of Open Access). Any such posting made before acceptance and publication of the Work shall be updated upon publication to include a reference to the Publisher-assigned DOI (Digital Object Identifier) and a link to the online abstract for the final published Work in the Journal.
Upon Publisher’s request, the Author agrees to furnish promptly to Publisher, at the Author’s own expense, written evidence of the permissions, licenses, and consents for use of third-party material included within the Work, except as determined by Publisher to be covered by the principles of Fair Use.
The Author represents and warrants that:
the Work is the Author’s original work;
the Author has not transferred, and will not transfer, exclusive rights in the Work to any third party;
the Work is not pending review or under consideration by another publisher;
the Work has not previously been published;
the Work contains no misrepresentation or infringement of the Work or property of other authors or third parties; and
the Work contains no libel, invasion of privacy, or other unlawful matter.
The Author agrees to indemnify and hold Publisher harmless from Author’s breach of the representations and warranties contained in Paragraph 6 above, as well as any claim or proceeding relating to Publisher’s use and publication of any content contained in the Work, including third-party content.
