Maria Elizabeth Grabe

Packaging Television News: The Effects of Tabloid on Information Processing and Evaluative Responses

This experiment assessed the impact of formal features associated with the packaging of tabloid and standard news on viewer arousal, attention, information recognition, memory, and evaluations of news. The flamboyant tabloid packaging style increased arousal and attention but did not have a significant impact on recognition memory or delayed free recall of information. Moreover, viewers found standard versions to be more believable and informative than the tabloid versions of news stories.

News Content and Form Implications for Memory and Audience Evaluations

This experiment examines the effect of tabloid and standard packaging styles on calm and arousing news stories. The goal of this line of research is to investigate the combined influence of form and content on information processing and viewer evaluations of television news. Results indicate that the bells and whistles of tabloid production features enhance memory for calm news items but overburden the information processing system when applied to arousing news content. The evaluative measures produced data that show formal features have an influence on the meaning viewers derive from news content and that they rate news packaged in the tabloid format as less objective and believable than stories without these dramatic features.

Hard Wired for Negative News? Gender Differences in Processing Broadcast News

The experimental study reported here investigated information processing of broadcast news at the intersection of audience gender (male versus female) and message valence (positive, negative, and ambiguous). Both audio and video dimensions of stimuli were manipulated to create the three valence frames. The data produced interactions between gender and message valence for self-reported arousal, as well as recognition memory and comprehension of news content. In particular, male viewers are associated with a negativity bias, reporting the highest arousal levels and producing the best recognition memory and comprehension scores for negatively valenced messages. Women, in contrast, show signs of an avoidance response to negatively framed news, rating positively valenced stories as more arousing as well as processing such messages more effectively than negatively framed messages. Within the information-processing paradigm these findings suggest that the gender variable deserves more research attention. The results also have implications for journalism practitioners.

Cognitive Access to Negatively Arousing News: An Experimental Investigation of the Knowledge Gap

Over the past 30 years, survey researchers have documented the existence of a knowledge gap and expressed concern that people with little education are falling behind because they do not acquire the information necessary to participate in socioeconomic spheres. This study is the first to offer (a) experimental evidence for the existence of the knowledge gap and (b) explanations for it in terms of varying levels of information processing capacities, or cognitive access. Participants from higher and lower educational backgrounds paid equal levels of attention to television news stories, but they did not display the same recognition memory for facts. Moreover, participants in the higher education group were physiologically more aroused by news than those in the lower education group. These findings do not pinpoint whether cognitive access is learned or innate, but they do suggest that the biological systems of people from higher educational backgrounds are particularly alert in preparing for information processing.

Crime Cultivation: Comparisons Across Media Genres and Channels

This study tests the idea that TV genres (crime drama, reality cop shows, news) and channels (TV and newspapers) vary in their potential to cultivate perceptions, fears, and behavior related to exposure and attention to crime content. Randomly selected adults (505) over the age of 18 in Indiana were interviewed. Regression analyses indicate significant variance across media genres and channels in their influence on viewer orientations to crime. Yet overall, media use is a relatively weak predictor of crime orientations. This study was conducted with grant support from the School of Journalism at Indiana University.

Making News Memorable: Applying Theory to the Production of Local Television News

This study experimentally compared stories that aired on local news programs across the U. 5. with revised versions of the same stories. The stories were revised based on a set of theoretically developed post production rules designed to make news stories easier to process without making them less attention grabbing or arousing. Hypotheses predicted that the revised stories would be more comprehensible and memorable, would not reduce physiological or self-reported levels of attention or arousal, and would receive more positive affective and cognitive evaluations than the original stories. The results showed that the revised versions of stories were better remembered and better evaluated without sacrificing viewer attention or arousal.

Informing Citizens: How People with Different Levels of Education Process Television, Newspaper, and Web News

This experiment tested the interaction of media channels (television, newspaper, and the Web), time delay, and the education level of audience members, using three memory measures. The lower education group encoded, stored, and retrieved television news information best while they showed less memory capacity for newspaper and Web news. For the higher education group, the opposite pattern emerged. They had better memory for newspaper and Web versions of news, compared to television. With time delay, these patterns persisted. They were also robust when controlling for participant evaluations of the news stories in terms of interest, informativeness, and understandability.

The role of screen size in viewer responses to television fare

Consumer demand for large screen television sets is on the rise, with sales of 27 inch and larger sets exceeding the most optimistic industry expectations. One reason for this demand may be that a large screen television delivers a different, more enjoyable, more intense viewing experience than a small screen model. This greater intensity may also indicate that large screen viewers experience a sense of presence, a feeling that they are in the environment portrayed on the screen. Eighty undergraduate students viewed 17 brief segments of a variety of current television programs on a consumer‐model television with either a small screen (12 inches, measured diagonally) or a large screen (46 inches). Subjects’ evaluative responses were measured via a questionnaire. Although they did not report greater enjoyment when watching the large screen, when differences between the perceived quality of the sets was controlled viewers reported a variety of more intense responses to the images on the large screen.

Sourcing and Reporting in News Magazine Programs: 60 Minutes versus Hard Copy

A number of studies consistently point at the disproportionate focus on elite news sources such as men in government and business while women, minorities, and working-class people are shown to be underrepresented as sources in the news. At the same time research reveals that soundbites from sources are shrinking while reporters are taking up increasingly more news airtime. In a society that rests on democratic ideals about the mass medias facilitation of a pluralistic public debate, these findings provoke concern. Virtually all studies on sourcing focus on newspapers and nightly television newscasts. This content analysis of 291 news stories focuses on tabloid and traditional news magazine programs. The findings of this study provide some support for the concerns about whose voices are heard in the news. Moreover, striking differences between tabloid and traditional news magazine sourcing patterns are revealed.

Television news magazine crime stories: A functionalist perspective

More than a century ago, Emile Durkheim argued that the rituals of processing and punishing crime are functional in constructing a societys morality, teaching its members to abide by certain rules, and promoting cohesion among members by making it public when individuals have violated shared moral values. This content analysis investigates network and syndicated news magazine crime stories for their potential to promote these three social Junctions. Programs were exhaustively sampled over a six month period (October 1, 1994 to March 31, 1995). Three coders content analyzed 272 hours of television programs. Results indicate patterns in the data set to support the Durkheimian notion that social systems ritualize crime events with functional implications for the maintenance of social order.