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Abstract
In many countries, television newscasts are increasingly relying on personalization and emotion exacerbation in their news coverage, arguably as a means to attract audiences. Such features are prominent in Latin American cultural products based on melodrama, such as telenovelas. While often deemed to be bad journalism, there is mixed evidence on the impact of such news treatment on knowledge acquisition, especially with audiences more attuned to these formats. Based on an experiment in Chile, this study tests the effects of melodramatic coverage on viewers’ recall and comprehension of news items. Results show that melodramatic treatment favors recall, but not comprehension of data included in the news reports. Comparisons across news treatment by gender, age group, and socio-economic status suggest that rather than overall differences, specific demographic groups are more affected by melodramatic news.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors thank Sebastián Valenzuela for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and Martina Piña for her assistance in conducting the experiment.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 This approach mimics a factorial design with a subset of reduced designs that maintain the balance property. This allowed for small groups while maintaining per-factor power and relying on tests that could forgo covariance, since setting of the subsets already factored in those elements (see Collins, Dziak, and Li Citation2009).