Disentangling News Story Effects on Public Opinion
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Cohen, Olivia
- Graduate Program:
- Mass Communications (PHD)
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- February 21, 2022
- Committee Members:
- Michael Schmierbach, Major Field Member
Fuyuan Shen, Outside Unit & Field Member
Mary Oliver, Major Field Member
Jessica Myrick, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Anthony Olorunnisola, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- news framing
public opinion
health communication
opioid use disorder - Abstract:
- Journalists make deliberate choices in how they will present prominent social issues to the public, namely deciding to showcase the issue through an individual’s experience or a societal-level perspective. Journalists often go for the former under the impression that by putting a face to an issue, the audience will show more care and concern. However, episodic-thematic scholarship on the issue has found generally that the opposite is more likely to occur unless audiences experience higher degrees of connectedness to the character and news story. On the other hand, Exemplification research demonstrates support for the notion that even in the presence of factual overview information, we place more weight on the individuals in news stories and are more influenced by them. To help understand why there may be a discrepancy between these theoretical areas, this online experiment (N = 468) dissected news frames into two parts, actor type, and statistical information, to test how these would individually and collectively influence narrative and civic engagement responses. A fully factorial design tested how a news story’s actor type (individual vs. social) and statical information (none vs. base-rate only vs. forecasting only vs. both) influence attributions of responsibility, issue importance, policy support, stigma, transportation, identification, state empathy, moral outrage, and moral disgust. Results suggest that social actors evoke higher levels of moral disgust and moral outrage, but actor type did not influence identification, transportation, and state empathy. When paired with varying levels of statistics, an interaction effect was observed with higher levels of statistics hindering moral outrage and disgust among stories that also featured social actors, but encouraging moral disgust and outrage with those that featured an individual actor. Moral disgust and outrage were found to mediate the relationships between actor type, stigma, attribution of responsibility, and perceived societal importance in unique ways. For journalists looking to motivate public engagement with social issues, the results from this study suggest journalists should be mindful of their combinations of focal characters and numerical information in their stories as this may influence audience affective responses and perceptions.