EFFECTS OF NEWS COVERAGE

EFFECTS OF NEWS COVERAGE

Long after the events reported in the news, what is remembered is the coverage. “The reality that lives on is the reality etched in the memories of the millions who watched rather than the few who were actually there” (G.E.Lang & Lang, 1984, p. 213). Now let us turn to examining the impact and effects of consuming news coverage, including memory for the news, its effects on decision making and other behaviors, and the effect of news reporting on foreign policy. Before we begin to look at effects directly, however, we need to examine how our point of view can affect our interpretation of news.

The Impact of Different Points of View

Part of the reason that people in different nations tend to perceive the same situations so differently is that the reality they construct in response to news is so different. Not only does the reporting of such events in the media vary in different places, but even more basically, the interpretation of the same events differs, depending on the knowledge and experience of those who hear or see the news. To illustrate, we look at a few case studies.

In late 1991, the beating of African American motorist Rodney King by some White Los Angeles police officers happened to be captured on videotape by an onlooker. The ensuing criminal trial of the officers resulted in a verdict of not guilty on most charges of police brutality in April 1992. The country was generally outraged at the verdict that seemed to go so against what appeared to be obvious excesses shown repeatedly on the news. Resulting civil disturbances and riots in Los Angeles and elsewhere brought to the forefront issues of race relations and urban decay. For our purposes, however, what is most interesting is the different reactions of African Americans and European Americans to the verdict. They did not differ in their general appraisal (most found it shocking and unfair). They did differ, however, in how typical they saw such a verdict. Most Whites saw it as an exceptional, although disturbing, miscarriage of justice. Most African Americans, used to receiving the short end of institutional justice and services, saw the outrageous verdict as more typical; thus their response was far more impassioned. The same news story and the same video sequence had a very different meaning for the two groups because of their different experience.

Many of the most intractable and chronic world conflicts have at their heart a gigantic divergence in point of view, a chasm that causes the two sides to interpret the same events totally differently. They also consistently fail to appreciate how differently other people view the same events. For example, during the Cold War (1945–1990), the Soviet Union and Western nations viewed each other through their own biases (Hirschberg, 1993). Israelis and Palestinians, Tutsis and Hutus, Serbs and Croats, and Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants see themselves besieged and oppressed by the other. When the West moved to expand NATO, for example, that looked much more threatening from Moscow, who saw it as an aggressive move. From their perspective, it looked like preparation for war to the east. When the United States moved hundreds of thousands of troops to the Persian Gulf and invaded two countries (Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003) to remove unfriendly regimes, neighboring countries quite reasonably wondered if they would be next, even if that concern seemed ridiculous to many Americans. See Box 7.6 for a more extended example of the sharply divergent points of view of Islam and the West on political, social, and religious issues.

213 A Cognitive Psychology of Mass Communication

News: Setting the Agenda About the World 214

Memory for the News

News offers an interesting case to test people’s memory in a real-world setting, with obvious applied, as well as important theoretical, import (Graber, 1989; McCombs & Reynolds, 2002; V.Price & Czilli, 1996). News stories in all media are most typically fairly short, self-contained pieces. S.L.Schneider and Laurion (1993) studied metamemory for radio news, finding that people’s assessment of what they had remembered from news was fairly accurate. In the case of television, however, the information involves more than the verbal content. The simultaneous presence of both the visual and auditory information provides the potential of their either complementing or interfering with each other in the processing of and memory for news content. In general, memory for visual themes is better than memory for verbal themes (Graber, 1990), and overall memory is better if there is a close fit between the video and the audio component, such as when the video illustrates exactly what was being described by the reporter. When the relationship is less clear or when the video and audio portions evoke different previous information from the viewer’s memory, comprehension and memory for the new information suffers (Grimes, 1990, 1991; Mundorf, Drew, Zillmann, & Weaver, 1990). Memory for persons in the news can also be affected by the viewers’ social attitudes, e.g., Whites’ being overly likely to identify an African American as a criminal suspect than a White person (Gibbons, Taylor, & Phillips, 2004; Oliver & Fonash, 2002). Assuming the video and audio portions are congruent, children remember news presented in a televised form better than news presented in a radio or print form, even if the print form contained illustrations (Walma van der Molen & van der Voort, 2000). See Graber (1988) and Gunter (1987) for discussions of memory for broadcast news.

BOX 7.6