This paper reports on the methods,findings, and implications of a largescale cross-cultural experiment on audience recall of brief news stories. Subjectsfrom Spain and from the United States were exposed, one-at-atime and under highly controlled conditions, to one of three local spot news stories presented via either newspaper, computer screen, television, or radio. Eachofthe720subjects wasastudent ina beginning courseinmedia studies, ineitheraspunishoran Am'canuniversity. Thestories were the same for eachgroup, with each carefully prepared in the two languages so as to be "matched." Careful attention was given to making the stories as close as possible in length, topic, organization, and coverage of specific details so as to permit direct comparisons between similar subjects in the two cultural settings. Distinct patterns of results with statisticallysignificant differences between the two cultural groups were found.Recall of news stories has been widely studied. In the United States, numerous investigations have probed how well people remember such stories after exposure to different media.' In addition, a number of investigations have studied how well people have or have not learned some set of news stories in a particular cultural setting. For example, within the last two decades, research on how well audiences remember news has been conducted in Britain, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Israel, and Kenya? However, true cross-cultural research on learning the news is another matter. No studies have been reported that have directly compared how well people with similar demographic characteristics, but in distinct societies, can remember similar news stories when presented by similar media.
Problems in Cross-Cultural ExperimentsOne reason true cross cultural research is so rare is that it is very difficult to achieve the conditions required. Such studies must directly or statistically control a number of extraneous conditions that can influence the dependent variable (news recall), while assessing that variable in the same way in different cultural settings. Even the logistics of gathering data in different countries are difficult. Using an experimental strategy (as opposed to surveys or qualitative studies) in cross-cultural research is the most difficult of all. In such a study, comparisons between the groups must be made under conditions of ceteris paribus -with other factors equal. In more