Lilach Nir

Not Necessarily the News: Does Fictional Television Influence Real-World Policy Preferences?

Communication and Political ScienceThe Hebrew UniversityIn 1992, when vice president of the United States Dan Quayle lashed outagainst fictional television personality Murphy Brown for glamorizing singlemotherhood and mocking the importance of fathers, many observers foundthe public dialogue surrounding this incident absurd. After all, Quayle wascriticizing the actions of a fictional character in a weekly sitcom, not a realperson (see, e.g., ‘‘Dan Quayle,’’ 1992). Likewise, in 2005 when a vicepresident of the National District Attorneys Association railed against thedrama In Justice on the editorial pages of the New York Times, he wascomplaining about a fictional television drama, not about events that hadactually happened (Marquis, 2006). Political leaders and the general publicoften express concerns about the influence of fictional programming on

Public Space: How Shared News Landscapes Close Gaps in Political Engagement

Although many studies documented how news increases political knowledge gaps, most insights are based on single country studies. Why are gaps wide in some countries and narrower in others? We propose that fragmentation of the broadcast news landscape provides citizens with differential opportunities to become informed. A shared (less fragmented) news landscape in a country offsets the advantages of individual motivation and ability to seek political information, and narrows gaps in engagement. Analyses of a cross-national survey of respondents in 13 countries and content analyses of news items from over 50 international print and television outlets show evidence consistent with the theoretical statements.

Reason within Passion: Values as Motivational Anchors of Israeli Opinion on the 2006 Lebanon War and Ceasefire

The relationship between core values and political opinions has been well documented but its implications for citizens’ awareness of the reasons that ground competing opinions are less well understood. This study examines the effect of value priorities on rating different rationales for a government decision to end a war. The relationship is tested among Israelis in the days following the aftermath of the 2006 Israel–Hezbollah war in Lebanon. Consistent with previous research, values, such as universalism, predicted dovish or hawkish positions on the ceasefire. In addition, however, different value priorities correlated, as expected, with their respective rationales for an opinion on the ceasefire. Moreover, both supporters and opponents evaluated valid (versus invalid) reasons as more important, regardless of their personal position. Overall findings suggest that, even in conflict, reasoned considerations resonate with the opinions of ordinary citizens.

How politics-news parallelism invigorates partisanship strength

Although past research has found that news exposure correlates with strong partisanship, insights are based on single-country studies. Other studies have shown that cross-national variations in news systems correlate with turnout, but have not explored partisanship. The current study fills this gap by testing the strength of the relationship between news exposure and partisanship cross-nationally. We argue that the greater the political parallelism in news systems, the stronger the correlation between news exposure and partisanship and the smaller the gaps in partisanship between those most and least educated. Multivariate analyses of the cross-national European Social Survey find empirical support for both hypotheses.

Receptivity to Violence in Ethnically Divided Societies: A Micro-Level Mechanism of Perceived Horizontal Inequalities

Although past scholarship shows that group inequalities in economic and political power (“Horizontal Inequalities”) correlate with dissent, violence, and civil wars, there is no direct empirical test of the perceptual explanation for this relationship at the individual level. Such explanation is vital to understanding how integration, inclusion in power-sharing agreements, and exclusion from political power filter down to mass publics. Moreover, subjective perceptions of group conditions do not always correspond to objective group realities. We hypothesize subjective perceptions attenuate the effect of objective exclusion on support for violence in ethnically divided societies. Cross-national comparative multilevel analyses of the 2005/6 Afrobarometer dataset (N = 19,278) confirm that subjective perceptions both amplify the effect of exclusion on acceptance of violence and alter the readiness of included groups to dissent. These findings carry implications for research, state-building, and conflict management.

Do Women and Men Respond Differently to Negative News

This article offers a new approach to studying sex differences in responses to negative news, using real-time physiological responses as opposed to self-reports. Measurements of skin conductance and heart rate are used to examine whether there are differences in the extent to which women and men are aroused by and attentive to negative news stories. Like experiments that have relied on postexposure self-reports, we detect no sex differences in arousal in response to negative news stories. However, in contrast to those experiments, we find indications that women are more attentive than men to negative news content. We consider possible reasons for this difference in findings. We also discuss neuropsychological studies that are consistent with our finding of greater attentiveness on the part of women to negative stimuli. Finally, we consider the relationship between our work and evidence in the literature that women consume less news than men.

Bridging Gaps in Cross-Cutting Media Exposure: The Role of Public Service Broadcasting

Previous studies show that individual political interest is an antecedent of news media exposure, particularly of exposure to differing views. Nevertheless, little is known about this effect from a comparative perspective: How do media institutions affect the relationship between political interest and exposure to cross-cutting viewpoints? One institutional feature that varies between countries is the ownership of broadcast media. This study investigates the extent to which the relative dominance of public service broadcasting alters the relationship between political interest and non-like-minded, or cross-cutting, news media exposure across 27 European Union countries. The analyses employ survey data from 27,079 individuals and media content from 48,983 news stories. The results confirm that the extent to which political interest contributes to cross-cutting exposure is contingent on the strength of public service broadcasting. The stronger the broadcaster, the smaller the gaps between the most and least politically engaged individuals.

Not All Countries Are Created Equal: Foreign Countries Prevalence in U.S. News and Entertainment Media

Why do some countries appear more popular than others in mass media? Although researchers have long sought to explain foreign countries’ prevalence in the media, to date they have exclusively focused on news, leaving other types of media content unexplored. In addition, focusing on media effects and media content, the literature on entertainment and politics has largely ignored the study of agenda-building processes. Thus, this study fills these gaps by exploring factors affecting the volume of references to foreign countries in both U.S. news and entertainment media. Analyzing more than 400 U.S. television shows, four news channels, and two newspapers spanning from 2000 to 2011, we reexamine past findings on salience of foreign countries in the news and apply these findings to a new field of research, entertainment media. We further suggest that the same factors shaping foreign countries’ prevalence in the news media are applicable to both news and entertainment and that in the context of foreign countries’ prevalence, the criteria for “newsworthiness” and “fictionworthiness” is similar.

Psychophysiology in the Study of Political Communication: An Expository Study of Individual-Level Variation in Negativity Biases

The use of psychophysiological measures has been relatively common in the study of communication; there has been a recent increase in interest among political behavioralists as well. There has nevertheless been a limited body of work that uses psychophysiological measures to better understand the impact of political mass media content. This article presents the case for using psychophysiological measures to study political communication. Focusing on skin conductance, it outlines the advantages of this measure for capturing subconscious responses to media over time, second-to-second. It then presents results from recent experimental work in the United States that highlights individual-level variation in responsiveness to negative versus positive news content—variation that is correlated with measures of psychophysiological reactions to non-news content, suggesting the relevance of deep-seated predispositions in psychophysiological research on media effects.