A news report on the plight of a minority of American family farmers was manipulated to create versions differing in the degree of precision of general information (precise, imprecise) and in the use of exemplifying case histories (selective, blended, representative). Selective exemplification featured only histories of failing farms, representative exemplijication a distribution of histories of failing and successful farms proportional to their actual occurrence. Respondents reported their o m views concerning the farmers' plight either shortly after reading or after a delay of one or two weeks. The accuracy of estimates of failing farms was found to be highest for representative and lowest for selective exempl$cationdespite the availability of corrective general information. These effects were stable over time.
~~~~~~~ ~Journalistic reports of social phenomena, although they may address a wide range of topics, customarily follow a set format. Irrespective of topic variance, news stories generally contain two major types of information: (1) base-rate information indicating the status of the issue under consideration, and (2) exemplifying information, or exemplars, about individuals whose experiences illustrate the scope of the phenomenon. Journalists combine the two types of information in news reports as a means to explain often complex social issues in language that is both understandable and interesting to their readers or viewers.'Base-rate information, which refers to general descriptions of the number of people or things involved in a given social phenomenon, may vary substantially in precision of quantification, ranging from ratiomeasurements involving minimal error to intuitive appraisals expressed in ordinal comparisons?Exemplars, on the other hand, are judged in terms of typicality rather than with quantified precision. They are defined here as case descriptions or specifications of singular incidents that fall within the realm of a particular social phenomenon and that exhibit the pertinent properties of this phenomenon to some degree. Given the phenomenon of stress in air controllers, for instance, any report of a controller's stress experience, whether severe and pathogenic or trivial and innocuous, would qualify as an exemplar. Such case descriptions are generally presumed to be veridical, as the outright fabrication of exemplars is rare in journalism? Ideally, exemplars should feature frequently occurring, typical cases. Yet typicality is not always the
DolfZillmann is professor of communication and psychology and senior associate dean for graduate studies and research at the University of Alabama. Rhonda Gibson is assistant professor of communication at Pennsylvania State University, and Joseph Perkins is a doctoral student in communication at the University of Alabama.
A news report on carjacking, presented in magazine format, was manipulated to create versions differing in exemplar distortion (minimally, mildly, substantially, and extremely) and precision of base rate information (imprecise, precise). Time of assessment (immediate, delayed) was varied as well. Readers evaluated carjacking as a national issue, as likely to worsen, as a local danger, and as a personal threat. They also estimated the proportion of carjacking victims suffering injury. The readers eventually rated aspects of the news report. Readers of news featuring extreme exemplar distortion considered carjacking to be a more serious national problem than did readers of news featuring minimally, mildly, or substantially distorted exemplars. This effect was uniform for precision of base rate information and was stable over time. Readers presented with exemplars of people killed during carjackings grossly overestimated the incidence of such an outcome. Additionally, they found the report more upsetting than did readers presented with less extreme exemplars. There were no significant differences, however, in evaluations of newsworthiness, importance, or accuracy of the various versions of the report.
A news report on an Appalachian tick disease was differently illustrated. It either contained no images, an image of ticks, or this tick image plus three child victims. The victims were ethnically balanced (two White, one Black) or not (either all White or all Black). The text did not make any reference to the victims' ethnicity. Respondents assessed the risk of contracting the disease for children of different ethnicity. Partiality in pictorially representing a particular ethnic group fostered the relative overestimation of risk for that group. Inclusion of the image of ticks, especially when combined with victim images, prompted higher risk assessment overall.
Data from a content analysis of forty-eight months of print and broadcast news about the economy were combined in time-series analyses with two indicators of consumer economic evaluations and three measures of real economic conditions to investigate second-level agenda-setting effects. Economic news was framed as negative more often than as positive, and negatively framed news coverage was one of several significant predictors of consumer expectations about the future of the economy. The study supports the argument that media coverage, particularly the media's emphasis on negative news, may have serious consequences for both expectations of and performance of the economy.
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