Papers by David Tewksbury
As the fourth estate, the news media serve a normatively significant role in contemporary society... more As the fourth estate, the news media serve a normatively significant role in contemporary society. They are the conduits through which individuals learn of issues outside their immediate life space. In addition, they introduce information and viewpoints that foster disagreement, discussion, and democracy. Not surprisingly, then, the news media are central influences on individuals' attitudes, cognitions, and behaviors. Such influences occur across a broad swath of issues, impact a host of demographic and social groups, and span countries and cultures around the globe. Over the past half-century, political communication and public opinion researchers have focused considerably on some related but conceptually distinct theories that have gained intellectual purchase: agenda-setting, priming, and framing. These theories have deeply shaped collective understanding of how individuals perceive and respond to their political and social worlds. Understanding these theories requires keeping in mind how they are situated in the wider arc of communication research and how assumptions about the nature of media influences have fluctuated over the years. In the early 20th century, the media-then comprising newspapers, books, film, and radio-were viewed as omnipotent. By the mid-20th century scholars were pronouncing that the media were not really omnipotent but had very limited effects. In the 1970s another pendulum swing occurred, and the field returned to the notion of an all-powerful media. This intellectual turn derived in large part from the rise of a mass society, in which individuals were living atomistically and, as scholars assumed, actively turning to the media to craft an image of social reality. Today scholars generally believe strong media effects can emerge for some individuals some of the time. The original formulation and refinements of the concepts discussed in this article-agenda-setting, priming, and framing-reflect the field's gravitation toward this view of contingent effects, particularly in light of an increasingly complex political and media landscape.
Improving Public Opinion Surveys
This chapter argues that while the ANES media exposure measures used in 2004 and before may have ... more This chapter argues that while the ANES media exposure measures used in 2004 and before may have been problematic on methodological grounds, it is important to continue asking questions about the process of information acquisition. A measurement strategy based on information retention, this chapter contends, requires survey instrumentation that is election-specific and unlikely to be valid over long stretches of time. The resulting problems of longitudinal continuity make this approach unsuitable as a stand-alone measurement strategy for the ANES. The chapter suggests that an expanded set of retooled media exposure measures can provide researchers with the variables needed to better understand the predictors of campaign knowledge, political attitudes, and voter turnout.
Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media
The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy, 2016
As the fourth estate, the news media serve a normatively significant role in contemporary society... more As the fourth estate, the news media serve a normatively significant role in contemporary society. They are the conduits through which individuals learn of issues outside their immediate life space. In addition, they introduce information and viewpoints that foster disagreement, discussion, and democracy. Not surprisingly, then, the news media are central influences on individuals' attitudes, cognitions, and behaviors. Such influences occur across a broad swath of issues, impact a host of demographic and social groups, and span countries and cultures around the globe. Over the past half-century, political communication and public opinion researchers have focused considerably on some related but conceptually distinct theories that have gained intellectual purchase: agenda-setting, priming, and framing. These theories have deeply shaped collective understanding of how individuals perceive and respond to their political and social worlds. Understanding these theories requires keeping in mind how they are situated in the wider arc of communication research and how assumptions about the nature of media influences have fluctuated over the years. In the early 20th century, the media-then comprising newspapers, books, film, and radio-were viewed as omnipotent. By the mid-20th century scholars were pronouncing that the media were not really omnipotent but had very limited effects. In the 1970s another pendulum swing occurred, and the field returned to the notion of an all-powerful media. This intellectual turn derived in large part from the rise of a mass society, in which individuals were living atomistically and, as scholars assumed, actively turning to the media to craft an image of social reality. Today scholars generally believe strong media effects can emerge for some individuals some of the time. The original formulation and refinements of the concepts discussed in this article-agenda-setting, priming, and framing-reflect the field's gravitation toward this view of contingent effects, particularly in light of an increasingly complex political and media landscape.
News on the Internet, 2012
Newspaper circulation has dropped 30% over the past two decades and advertising revenues are now ... more Newspaper circulation has dropped 30% over the past two decades and advertising revenues are now less than half of their 2006 total. Rick Edmonds et al.
This chapter examines how citizens acquire political information using the internet. For some tim... more This chapter examines how citizens acquire political information using the internet. For some time, researchers have been looking at the form of news online and how news audiences find (or at least encounter), consume, and retain political content there. The available literature suggests that major news outlets rarely create content exclusively for the online audience. In fact, news online is often similar to what one finds in print newspapers. Internet audiences are increasingly likely to seek news online, but there is little evidence thus far that this has resulted in replacement of print newspapers and television news. Online audiences tend to limit their reading to topics of special interest to them, though not to the extent that some observers expected. There is some evidence that learning from the news is different online than off. The reviewed research on learning from online news suggests that the national news audiences may become fragmented if they rely on the internet for...
Doing News Framing Analysis II
This study examines whether readers of the paper and online versions of a national newspaper acqu... more This study examines whether readers of the paper and online versions of a national newspaper acquire different perceptions of the importance of political issues. Using data from a weeklong experiment in which subjects either readthe print version of the New York Times, the online version of that paper, or received no special exposure, this study finds evidence that people exposed to the Times for 5 days adjusted their agendas in response to that exposure and that print readers modified their agendas differently than did online readers. In the process of disseminating information about what Walter Lippmann called the “world outside,” the press does much more than merely inform its audiences. By selecting which public affairs stories will be reported and by giving specialprominence to some stories, the news media suggest which peo ple, issues, and events are especially deserving of public attention. Given the importance of this attention-directing function, we might ask whether the na...
At the heart of Post-Broadcast Democracy is a portrait of the average American that few of us wou... more At the heart of Post-Broadcast Democracy is a portrait of the average American that few of us would dispute: If we had the choice, most of us would spend more time with entertainment media than with news. H. L. Menken famously opined that few people went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public, and the suggestion that the average American would avoid serious news in favor of entertainment has been a truism subject to little more than anecdotal verification. Things may have stayed that way were it not for changes in the television environment that have altered the relationship between news and entertainment programming. Setting the entertainment preference notion in the context of television channel proliferation, Markus Prior has produced a convincing and worrisome set of analyses of the evolving relationship between television consumption and political beliefs and behaviors. One of the most attractive elements of Prior's book is that we need not assume tha...
Improving Public Opinion Surveys, 2012
Information and Citizenship in the 21st Century, 2012
Political Communication, 2000
... This anxiety reflects both negative affect and low levels of confidence regarding computer us... more ... This anxiety reflects both negative affect and low levels of confidence regarding computer use (Heins-sen et al., 1987; for a more recent review, see Scott & Rockwell, 1997). It seems reason-able to expect that comfort with using computers may influence willingness to use the ...
Journal of Communication, 2011
Observers of the television news business have suggested that public judgments of the credibility... more Observers of the television news business have suggested that public judgments of the credibility of news stories and the news industry would suffer if audiences knew that external sources routinely provided story content. An experiment examined whether onscreen labels identifying externally supplied video news release (VNR) content in television news can affect audience perceptions of the credibility of the news and the VNR provider. The results suggest that news audiences might not use the presence of VNR content in evaluations of news stories, news programs, and VNR producers. However, there is evidence that news audiences are concerned about the use of VNR content and support the use of labels.
Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 2012
Gatekeepers usually control news information. However, recent technological advancements might re... more Gatekeepers usually control news information. However, recent technological advancements might require rethinking previous gatekeeping hierarchies. Aggregation algorithms currently filter and present news information to millions of American Internet users daily. A content analysis demonstrates significant differences between health news content retrieved from Web sites that aggregate their articles from many sources (e.g., Google News), and those that focus on providing news from a limited number of sources (e.g., CNN.com). Explanations for these content differences are discussed, as are implications concerning health information seeking and Internet news consumption.
International encyclopedia of media psychology, 2020
Psychological models designed to explain the influence of media exposure abound. Most are focused... more Psychological models designed to explain the influence of media exposure abound. Most are focused on specific phenomena, intended to explain how a particular class of messages might exert certain effects in audiences. The accessibility-applicability model (AAM; Price & Tewksbury, 1997) is designed to be relatively broad, explaining how mediated messages interact with their receivers' existing knowledge, attitudes, feelings, goals, and values to produce meaningful outcomes. The model is based on research in psychology and political communication and has been used to explain the processes of framing, agenda-setting, and issue priming. It can describe a range of message effect processes, though, and has seen some application outside of political communication effects. Subsequent to its original publication, researchers who have applied the model have suggested revisions, improving its utility for explaining more specific phenomena and in certain conditions. The AAM was presented in "News Values and Public Opinion: A Theoretical Account of Media Priming and Framing," a chapter in the 13th volume in the Progress in Communication Sciences series from Ablex (Price & Tewksbury, 1997). The volume was focused on persuasion research, and the chapter was produced as a way to link commonly studied political communication effects with mainstream persuasion research. The focus of the chapter is an exploration of the ways that journalists who create news stories applying common themes and structures (i.e., news values) of storytelling can develop news flows that produce predictable, systematic effects on public opinion. Drawing a conceptual link from common news production patterns to public opinion outcomes requires the explication of the psychological processes that govern how audiences receive, interpret, store, and use what they find in the news. Political communication researchers have identified a substantial number of ways that exposure to news messages can affect how people understand events, people, issues, and policies in the public domain. Three of the most commonly studied phenomena are framing, agenda-setting, and issue priming. Framing (see also framing) refers to the images and words journalists use to describe public problems and policies. Their descriptions of public phenomena help define the causes, consequences, and remedies of problems and the contours for policies and other actions. A frame is a succinct characterization of a problem or policy. It distills the phenomenon to its basic form and suggests, through intrapersonal and cultural resonances, who and what is responsible for a problem or solution. A frame can be shorthand for a set of claims and evidence about the causes and consequences of a problem but, by itself, it does not present arguments.
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Papers by David Tewksbury