The Scary World in Your Living Room and Neighborhood: Using Local Broadcast News, Neighborhood Crime Rates, and Personal Experience to Test Agenda Setting and Cultivation

Abstract

This study tested 2 important theories in the history of mass communication research, agenda setting and cultivation, by comparing the effects of watching local television news with direct experience measures of crime on issue salience and fear of victimization. Direct experience was measured in 2 ways: (a) personal crime victimization or victimization of a close friend or family member, and (b) neighborhood crime rates. Using a random digit dial telephone survey of residents of theWashington, DC, metropolitan area, researchers found that local news exposure accounted for an agenda-setting effect but did not cultivate fear of being a victim of crime. By contrast, direct experience had no agenda-setting effect but did predict fear.

Mediatization and the Disproportionate Attention to Negative News

“…For example, media emphasizing or hyping violence committed by social movement groups or minorities fosters negative attitudes towards those groups for those exposed to this news (Entman 1993;Gilliam and Iyengar 2000;Gitlin 1980); exaggerating the incidence of violent crime makes crime a more salient issue in the minds of audiences (Gross and Aday 2003); and a focus on political scandal activates political cynicism (Cappella and Jamieson 1997;Sabato 2000). Exposure to negatively loaded news cannot only alter perception but may even result in the amplification of perceived risk or actual behavior.…”

“…Exposure to negatively loaded news cannot only alter perception but may even result in the amplification of perceived risk or actual behavior. For example, media exposure has been related to increased fear of and concern about crime despite declining trends in crime (Gerbner and Gross 1976;Romer, Jamieson, and Aday 2003;Gross and Aday 2003), social reality judgments regarding race (|Dixon 2006a(|Dixon , 2006bGilliam and Iyengar 2000;Entman 1993;Gitlin 1980), and reinforced imitation of suicide by frequent reportage on suicide (Pirkis et al 2006). Moreover, by exaggerating consequences, media have been found to be significant contributors to the construction of worries about airline safety management (Li et al 2015).…”

The role of television viewing and direct experience in predicting adolescents' beliefs about the health risks of fast-food consumption

“…This interaction is consistent with the proposed underlying explanation that the availability-based cultivation effect of TV viewing dissipates as direct, personal experience increases the perceived health risks (Keller, Siegrist, & Gutscher, 2006). This finding thus adds to the body of empirical evidence of the interplay of direct experience and the impact of cumulative TV viewing on audiences’ beliefs in prior cultivation research focused on perceptions of crime or affluence (Gross & Aday, 2003). The findings that perceived health risks, which are rarely portrayed on TV, increase as directexperience with fast food increases and that direct experience moderates the relationship between TV exposure and risk perceptions are akin to the resonance pattern documented in cultivation research.…”

Does television terrify tourists? Effects of US television news on demand for tourism in Israel

“…Romer et al (2003) analyse data from the US General Social Survey to show that individuals' perceptions of the frequency of crime, conditional on a range of socio-economic characteristics, depend not only on actual crime in their locality, but also the intensity of crime reporting in the local television media. This evidence is reinforced by more detailed surveys of individual cities, showing that people watching more television news perceive there to be a higher level of violent crime, ceteris paribus (Romer et al, 2003;Gross and Aday, 2003;Chiricos et al, 1997).…”