Memorable encounters: Ideology, information acquisition, and television news

Abstract

Many consumers of television news perceive the ideological position held by certain networks as being either consonant with, or dissonant from, their own political beliefs. This raises the question of how the perceived consonance or dissonance of media sources influences the viewer's ability to acquire and recall information. It is possible that being exposed to a consonant media source could lead an individual to pay more attention, whereas the individual would be more inclined to dismiss a dissonant media source. In contrast, however, it is also possible that an individual may pay extra attention to the dissonant media source because it presents a perspective that differs from the one that individual currently holds. Utilizing an experimental research design, I am able to demonstrate that individuals are better able to acquire and recall information presented to them by a media source that they perceive to be ideologically dissonant from their own political position.

Notes

1 A poll conducted on behalf of Media Matters for America by the Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group, Washington, D.C., in November 2004 indicated that at least thirty-five percent of the American public perceived FNC as being overtly conservative, and at least twenty-six percent of the American public perceived CNN as being liberally biased.

2 The State of the News Media 2004 study, the results of which can be accessed at http://www.journalism.org/, confirmed that foreign policy stories were a major part of cable news broadcasts when this study was conducted, as this type of story constituted 24% and 21% of the broadcast time on CNN and Fox News Channel, respectively.

3 A number of factors were considered when deciding which stories from the videotaped broadcasts to select for this analysis. Stories that featured highly recognizable “talking head pundits”, were not used. These pundits present “commentary” or “news analysis,” whereas my concern is whether viewers are better able to acquire and recall information from the actual hard news stories. Second, stories that contained a substantial amount of back and forth banter between the reporter and anchor were not chosen because of the logistical difficulties of replicating the anchor/reporter interaction. The final selection of stories came from those left over after the initial elimination process.

4 It is important to note that any artificiality that remains in the replications should constitute a conservative bias for hypothesis testing. Although the news stories were produced in a professional news studio with the help of a professional anchor, the studio lacked the characteristic trappings of the major networks. Also, network affiliations were conveyed via verbal reference, which was not reinforced with a visual logo. In short, Fox News Channel and CNN broadcasts make it even clearer what network the viewer is watching, and the fact that my replications could only approximate a portion of this cueing effect means that any ideological signals transmitted in my tests almost certainly were weaker than those conveyed by actual Fox News Channel and CNN broadcasts.

5 Individual professors had control over the manner and amount of extra credit that was awarded. As a result, participants were rewarded for their participation in different manners, and at varying degrees, depending upon the class in which they were enrolled. However, I have no reason to believe that the participants were aware of this fact, and I also do not believe that this had any influence on the responses they provided in the experiment.

6 In this instance, randomization was successful. The ideological breakdown among those watching CNN was 42% conservative, 39% liberal, and 19% moderate. Among those watching FNC, 38% were conservative, 36% liberal, and 24% moderate. The breakdown along gender lines was evenly distributed, as 53% of those watching FNC were female, while 52% of those watching CNN was male. This randomization process also ensured that the size of each experimental cell was roughly the same, as 81 respondents watched CNN, and 77 respondents watched FNC.

7 The two stories selected for this examination were randomly chosen from the five stories presented by each network.

8 A Pearson goodness of fit p-value of .95 was calculated for this dataset, which indicated that a Poisson regression was appropriate for this examination.

9 Political ideology was recoded by subtracting 1 from the scale, and then dividing the scale by 6.

10 Dissonance was recoded by dividing the scale by 10.