Mark Boukes

Political news with a personal touch: How human interest framing indirectly affects policy attitudes

Journalists increasingly use personal exemplars in news stories about political issues. This study experimentally investigated how such human interest framing indirectly affects political attitudes via the way people attribute responsibility of an issue. Results show that exposure to human interest-framed television news increased attribution of responsibility to the government for the portrayed problem, which in turn decreased support for the government to cut public spending on this issue. This article explains how and why these findings are in line with exemplification theory but run counter to findings of studies on episodic framing effects.

Soft News With Hard Consequences? Introducing a Nuanced Measure of Soft Versus Hard News Exposure and Its Relationship With Political Cynicism

The possibly detrimental consequences of soft news are subject of popular and academic debate. This study investigates how watching particular news genres—soft versus hard—relates to cynicism about politics among Dutch citizens. A nuanced and novel scale measuring relative exposure to soft versus hard news is introduced using nonparametric unidimensional unfolding. The analysis of three public opinion surveys demonstrates a strong relationship between people’s position on this hard versus soft news exposure scale and political cynicism. People who watched relatively more soft news were more cynical about politics than people who watched relatively more hard news. This relationship was not conditional on individuals’ level of political knowledge and interest.

Linking Survey and Media Content Data: Opportunities, Considerations, and Pitfalls

ABSTRACT In media effects research a fundamental choice is often made between (field) experiments or observational studies that rely on survey data in combination with data about the information environment or media coverage. Such studies linking survey data and media content data are often dubbed “linkage studies.” On the one hand, such designs are the state of the art in our field and on the other hand, they come with a long list of challenges and choices. This article reviews the rationales for linkage studies, outlines different types of linkage studies, reviews the state-of-the-art in this area, discusses which survey and content items to use in an analysis, reviews different types of analyses, outlines considerations for alternative specifications, and provides a step-by-step example.

News With an Attitude: Assessing the Mechanisms Underlying the Effects of Opinionated News

Opinionated news targets communities of likeminded viewers, relies on dramaturgical storytelling techniques, and shares characteristics with political satire. Accordingly, opinionated news should be understood as a specific form of political entertainment. We have investigated the mechanisms underlying the effects of opinionated news on political attitudes using an experimental design that employed manipulated television news items. Findings confirm that opinionated news positively affects policy attitudes via its presumed influence on others and subsequent perceptions of the opinion climate. However, opinionated news also negatively affects attitudes via hostile media perceptions and evoked anger, especially for people with incongruent political preferences. Due to these opposing processes, we found no total effect of opinionated news on policy attitudes. Conditions are discussed under which either the positive or the negative indirect effect is likely to dominate.

A general pattern in the construction of economic newsworthiness? Analyzing news factors in popular, quality, regional, and financial newspapers:

Journalists use news factors to construct newsworthy stories. This study investigates whether different types of news outlets emphasize different news factors. Using a large-scale manual content analysis (n = 6489), we examine the presence of seven news factors in economic news across four different outlets types (i.e. popular, quality, regional, and financial newspapers). Results suggest that popular and regional newspapers particularly rely on the news factors of personification, negativity, and geographical proximity. Quality newspapers, instead, employ a rather general pattern of news factors, whereas the financial newspaper consistently relies on less news factors in its reporting. Findings urge scholars to move toward a more detailed understanding of how newsworthiness is constructed in different types of news outlets.

The Economy, the News, and the Public: A Longitudinal Study of the Impact of Economic News on Economic Evaluations and Expectations:

This article studies the tripartite relationship between the economy, economic news, and public economic perceptions. Our analysis is twofold: We investigate the impact of the real economy on economic news in Dutch newspapers (2002-2015, N = 127,120); second, we analyze the impact of economic news on public economic perceptions. Our empirical approach builds on and contributes to the literature by making nuanced distinctions between (a) economic levels and changes (positive/negative), (b) volume and tone of coverage (positive/negative), and, most importantly, (c) people’s retrospective and prospective economic judgments. Our analyses show that the public is presented a version of economic reality that is skewed to the negative, which strongly affects people’s economic expectations but not evaluations. Extending media-dependency theory, these results demonstrate the necessity to both conceptually and empirically distinguish between people’s retrospective and prospective judgments.

Back to Reality: The Complex Relationship between Patterns in Immigration News Coverage and Real-World Developments in Dutch and Flemish Newspapers (1999-2015)

Although prior studies investigating immigration news typically documented a dominant focus on negativity and threats, only limited empirical research is available, which scrutinizes the way real-world developments affect these patterns in immigration news. This study aims to fill this void. First, we report results of a large-scale and longitudinal content analysis (N = 4,340,757) of trends in immigration news coverage in two Western European cases, Flanders (the northern, Dutch-speaking, largest region of Belgium) and the Netherlands, from 1999 to 2015. Both the salience of immigration as a news topic on itself and its linkages with three prominent issues (i.e., crime, terrorism, and socioeconomic issues) are explored. Second, this study builds on previous insights by comparing dynamics in immigration news to real-world events and developments. Overall, the results show that the linkage of immigration to issues of crime, terrorism, and the economy in Flemish and Dutch newspapers was considerable throughout the 17-year period under study. Yet there is limited evidence for a close relationship between news and real-life developments; hence, trends in immigration news seem largely unaffected by trends in society.

On the Street and/or on Twitter?: The use of “every day” sources in economic news coverage by online and offline outlets

By means of a large-scale manual content analysis of Dutch economic news coverage in 2015 (n = 4251 articles), we compare the use of “every day” sources by online and offline outlets. The use of those sources is argued to increase news consumers’ attentiveness to the news item. We investigate whether online outlets use the “ordinary citizen” less frequently, both generally speaking as well as a source, while relying more on social media posts. Our empirical analysis focuses on a comparison between two online quality outlets (nrc.nl and vk.nl), two online popular outlets (nu.nl and telegraaf.nl), two offline quality outlets (NRC Handelsblad and de Volkskrant) and two offline popular outlets (Algemeen Dablad and de Telegraaf). Overall, results suggest a limited use of ordinary citizens as news sources, and even less use of social media. Multivariate logistic regression models, controlling for the length of news items as well as the day of publishing, ‘show that offline outlets use ordinary citizens more often, while online outlets rely more on social media’. Additionally, we find the differences between popular and quality outlets a lot less pronounced, with the latter only making slight more use of social media sources.

News consumption and its unpleasant side effect: Studying the effect of hard and soft news exposure on mental well-being over time

Following the news is generally understood to be crucial for democracy as it allows citizens to politically participate in an informed manner; yet, one may wonder about the unintended side effects it has for the mental well-being of citizens. With news focusing on the negative and worrisome events in the world, framing that evokes a sense of powerlessness, and lack of entertainment value, this study hypothesizes that news consumption decreases mental well-being via negative hedonic experiences; thereby, we differentiate between hard and soft news. Using a panel survey in combination with latent growth curve modeling (n = 2,767), we demonstrate that the consumption of hard news television programs has a negative effect on the development of mental well-being over time. Soft news consumption, by contrast, has a marginally positive impact on the trend in well-being. This can be explained by the differential topic focus, framing and style of soft news vis-à-vis hard news. Investigating the effects of news consumption on mental well-being provides insight into the impact news exposure has on variables other than the political ones, which definitively are not less societally relevant.

Combined Forces: Thinking and/or Feeling? How News Consumption Affects Anti-Muslim Attitudes through Perceptions and Emotions about the Economy:

This study develops a model that contributes to our understanding of the complex relationship between economic motivations and anti-Muslim attitudes by analyzing the underexplored role of news consumption. Using a large-scale Dutch panel dataset (n = 2694), we test a structural equation model theoretically grounded in group conflict theory, in which the relationship between news consumption and anti-Muslim attitudes is mediated by perceptions and emotions about the economy. Findings offer sound empirical support for the hypothesized model: news consumption increases pessimistic economic perceptions and negative emotions about the economy, which in turn strengthens anti-Muslim attitudes. The mechanism, however, largely depends on the type of news outlet and genre: watching television seems more decisive than reading newspapers; moreover, especially exposure to soft and popular news formats plays a dominant role.