media effects stereotypes & knowledge

1. Mark Peffley PS 475 Media & Politics

3.  Content analysis:
 Racially biased images in localTV news over-
represents black suspects. (Louisville in 1990s
as well as other cities)
 Survey:
 to establish association between heavyTV
watching and views on race and crime in a
natural setting
 Experiment:
 to establish cause & effect of watchingTV
news

4. Punitive Remedies:
• “enforcement of the
death penalty for people
convicted of murder;'
• "three strikes and you're
out legislation,"
• "putting more police on
the streets."
Old-fashioned racism:
rate African-Americans more
negatively on the following
traits
• "law abiding”
• "disciplined“
• "lazy."
Thus far, the results are
reminiscent of Gerbner’s
cultivation theory. But the
authors didn’t stop here.

5. Note: colors here are not identical to those used in the experiments
Adult participants were recruited
in a shopping mall, and filled out
questionnaire and watched
broadcast in a kiosk.
Subjects are randomly assigned to watch a 15 minute local news broadcast (with
commercials) that included one of 4 versions of a crime story inserted in the
middle of the broadcast that is identical except for the image of the perpetrator:
1) no image of perpetrator
2) white perpetrator
3) black perpetrator
4) no crime story at all
Early days of Photoshop

6. In the condition where No Suspect is portrayed, most people
mistakenly “recall” the suspect was black.

7. • Either stories with no perp. or black perp. lead to more negative racial
stereotypes & support for punitive crime policies amongWhites.
• Different effects among Blacks subjects, who resist the crime “script.”

9. 1. they lived in all-white suburbs
2. they watched news stories with a black
perpetrator
3. they watched news stories with no
perpetrator
4. Both 2 & 3
0%
0%
0%
0%

10.  Learning is complex and conditional. Depends on
medium, issue, and citizens (audience).
 Hypothesized medium differences
 Television
 Newspapers
 Magazines
 What medium –TV, magazines or newspapers—would you
expect to lead to the greatest gains in learning?Why?

11.  General concerns about using survey research
 Survey research as too blunt to capture cause & effect of media
influence, especially subtle effects that may be short-term and “small”
but could make a critical difference in an election
 Specific concerns about using surveys to study learning
 Correlation between political sophistication and different news media:
▪ Watching television news, low pol. knowledge
▪ Reading newspapers, high pol. Knowledge
▪ What’s causing what?
 Selection effect:
▪ People with lower sophistication watch a lot of television because it places
lower demands on them (to understand the news)
 Need multi-method design to study learning across different media

12. How does learning vary across:
• Medium?
• Issue?
• Cognitive skills of the individual?

18. Factual knowledge assessed in pre-test and post-test:
Example:

19.  The strength ofTV news is its ability to grab viewers’
attention before ingesting hard news and contextual
information, especially for people with medium cognitive
skills and low salience issues
 Question: at what point does infotainment of broadcast
news become distracting and interfere with learning?
 More general implications:
 Different media for different people and different issues
 Media complementarity
 Question:This study was done in 1992; if they did their
study in 2015, how might the authors’ conclusions
change?