In recent years many scholars seem to agree that viewers '
Keywords: television news use, interpretation, user perspective, interpretive complexity, differentiation, integrationWhat impact does television news have on its viewers? Although relatively little is known about the answer to this question, among the things that many communication researchers seem to have agreed upon in recent years is that the influence of television news is something in which meaning construction by the viewers plays a prominent role. Watching news is 'making meaning'. This is a much more complex process than merely absorbing and reproducing news facts. To make sense of a news item, viewers restructure it in their minds, elaborate or simplify it, and integrate parts of it into their stock of knowledge, while other parts are seemingly discarded. Because of this, neither the reception nor the im-
270Gabi Schaap, Karsten Renckstorf and Fred Wester pact of television news can be satisfactorily measured by testing the recall of news facts, which has been the standard way of studying the impact of news (Al-Menayes and Sun, 1993;Berry, 1983;Graber, 1984;Höijer, 1998;Neuman, 1981;Putnam, 1971;Schaap, 2004; Woodall, Davison, and Sahin, 1983). In other words, to answer the question on whether and how the news affects its viewers, one must ask the question what meanings viewers construct from this complex combination of sounds and images (cf.