Political Communication 2012 Abstracts
Bamboozling the Public? Developing a Theory of Strategic Misinformation • Michelle Amazeen, Temple University • This paper explores whether there is any relationship between how candidates are perceived by the public and whether candidates distort claims in their political ads. A theory of strategic misinformation hypothesizes that candidates are more likely to use inaccurate claims in their attack ads for dimensions on which their opponent is perceived more favorably.
Caustic comments: Measuring incivility in online comments and testing its effects on political participation • Ashley Anderson; Michael Xenos; Dominique Brossard; Dietram A. Scheufele • In this study, we use computer sentiment analysis to analyze the content of online comments in blogs and news stories between November 2010 and January 2012. Results reveal that, on average across two distinct issues, 17% of online comments contain an uncivil tone. Follow-up experimental analysis among a sample representative of the U.S. population demonstrates that exposure to uncivil comments following a newspaper blog post decreases likelihood to participate in a public forum.
When political comedy turns personal: Humor types, audience evaluations, and attitudes • Amy Becker, Towson University; Beth Haller, Towson University • The current study brings together research on the effects of political comedy with a focus on disability studies and disability humor. Satire surrounding David Paterson, New York’s first blind and African-American governor, is featured as stimuli in an experiment conducted during Spring 2011. The results compare the differential impact of exposure to self-directed humor and other directed hostile-humor on evaluations of humor types, favorability ratings, perceptions of disability, and attitudes toward blindness.
Framing in the last fifteen years: Examining definitions, citations, mechanisms and antecedents across fifteen disciplines • Porismita Borah • A content analysis was conducted of the framing literature from 93 peer-reviewed journals for fifteen years. First, every journal in the Journal Citation Report, (ISI) identified as a “communication journal” was included. Second, keyword searches in electronic databases were used. Findings reveal most common definitions, most cited framing scholars, psychological mechanisms, and the antecedents of frames. The variables are examined across fifteen different disciplines. Future directions are discussed.
Is Facebook making us dumber? Exploring social media use as a predictor of political knowledge • Michael Cacciatore, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Sara Yeo; Leona Yi-Fan Su; Doo-Hun Choi, University of Wisconsin, Madison; Michael Xenos; Dietram A. Scheufele; Dominique Brossard; Ashley Anderson; Jiyoun Kim; Elizabeth Corley, Arizona St. University • Two-thirds of adult U.S. Internet users report using social networking sites (SNSs), such as Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn (Madden & Zickuhr, 2011). Perhaps not surprisingly, Facebook is most popular, with more than 130 million active American users at the end of 2011 (Mitchell, Rosenstiel, & Christian, 2012).
Need for Orientation, Selective Exposure and Attribute agenda setting effects: Change versus Reinforcement • Lindita Camaj, University of Houston • This study explores the interaction between the concept of need for orientation (NFO) and selective exposure to explain citizen’s motivations to seek information from specific media sources and the consequences of this behavior for attribute agenda setting effects.
A Tale of Political Trust at the National and Local Levels: Examining Media Effects on Political Trust in China • Chujie Chen, City University of Hong Kong; Mengqian Yuan • Compared with Western people, the Chinese were reported to have higher level of trust in national political institutions than in the local ones. Employing secondary data from ABS (Asian Barometer Survey), this paper examined the media effects on national political trust and local political trust, and the significant gap between the two levels. Logistic regression coefficients indicated that the gap of political trust in China was associated with Internet exposure, trust in traditional media, social trust, and perceived corruption of government.
Stumbling Into Action: How Incidental Exposure and News Consumption Influence Social Capital and Civic Participation • Mark Coddington, University of Texas at Austin; Homero Gil de Zúñiga, University of Texas at Austin; Thomas J. Johnson, University of Texas at Austin • As the rise of social networking sites has increased the breadth of information to which online media consumers are exposed, researchers have begun to more closely examine the social and political effects of incidental exposure to news online. This study builds on that research by measuring the relationship between online incidental exposure to news and social capital and civic participation, particularly in how they interact with overall news use.
Covering the Veil: France 24.com and CNN.com’s Framing of the French Burqa Ban • Sally Ann Cruikshank, Ohio University; Joachim Hechinger • This study examines how France24.com and the U.S. edition of CNN.com framed France’s burqa ban, which went into effect on April 11, 2011. Results showed that both websites primarily framed the ban as a human rights issue. France 24 covered the ban in a negative tone in two-thirds of its stories, while CNN’s coverage of the issue was mainly neutral. The findings contradict the propaganda model, which suggests media coverage often reflects the policies of their government.
The Effects of Social Media on Political Participation and Candidate Image Evaluations in the 2012 Iowa Caucuses • Daniela Dimitrova, Iowa State University; Dianne Bystrom • Much academic debate has centered around the impact of new online technologies on democracy. This study examines the effects of social media on political participation and candidate image evaluations in the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses. Multivariate analyses show that social media have no effects on likelihood of caucus attendance, but significantly influence perceptions of candidates among the sample of Iowans drawn here. The implications of these finding for future political communication research are addressed.
Discourse architecture, issue stances, and democratic norms in online political discussion • Deen Freelon, American University • Studies of political discussions online have been dominated by approaches that focus exclusively on deliberation, ignoring other equally relevant communication norms. This study conducts a normative assessment of discussion spaces in two prominent web platforms—Twitter hashtags and newspaper comment sections devoted to particular political issues—applying the norms of communitarianism, liberal individualism, and deliberation. The platforms’ distinct design features and users’ left/right issue stances emerge as significant predictors of normative differences.
Civic Responsibility or Consumer Desire: Morning News and Priming Support for a Social Cause • Melissa R. Gotlieb, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Kjerstin Thorson, University of Southern California • This study extends research on media priming effects to investigate whether the news media environment can prime support for a social cause. Consistent with the matching hypothesis, we found that among those high in materialism, exposure to morning news segments focused on consumption, as opposed to civic practices, resulted in a decreased willingness to engage in conscious consumption and make a charitable contribution in support of efforts to reduce bottled water consumption.
Parent-Child Communication Patterns, School Political Discussions, News Media Use and Adolescent Knowledge and Political Interest in the 2008 Presidential Election • Chang-Dae Ham; Joonghwa Lee, Middle Tennessee State University; Esther Thorson, University of Missouri-Columbia • The focus in this study concerned whether two family communication patterns, socio and concept oriented, interact with news media exposure and youth classroom experiences with civics. These relationships were examined in a national sample of adolescents 12-17 and their parents. Youth political interest is indeed predicted by some complex interactions of family communication, news media, and classroom communication, but when you look at political knowledge, political interest mediates most all of those effects.
Wishful Thinking and Predictive Accuracy in U.S. Presidential Elections from 1952 to 2008 • Barry Hollander, University of Georgia • When asked to predict who will win an election, individuals tend to choose their preferred candidate as the likely winner. This preference-expectation link, called wishful thinking, and its subsequent effect, predictive accuracy, are explored through analysis of U.S. presidential elections from 1952 to 2008 and an in-depth look at a panel study of the 2008 election. Several factors are found to enhance and moderate the effect.
Who Leads Media Agenda? • Jeong Ran Kim, University of California at Davis • This study examines the roles of official sources and non-official sources in an agenda-building process. Focusing on the Korea-U.S. beef negotiation and second-level agenda building, this study compares the agenda-building influences of the government with influences of activist groups. This paper uses intermedia and intercandidate agenda setting to analyze intersource relationship between the government and activist groups.
Partisanship, Message Framing, and the Effectiveness of Negative Political Advertising • Kenneth Kim, Oklahoma State • While voter judgments in the election process emerge through multiple layers of influence, the current study focuses on partisanship as an individual characteristic that may influence how people process negative political advertising messages. The main purpose of the study is to explore interaction between partisanship and gain-loss message framing as a specific persuasive appeal strategically placed in a negative political ad. The obtained data showed the main effects of partisanship on attitudes toward the target and voting intentions.
The Effects of Politician’s and Constituency Characteristics on Political Use of Twitter • Cheonsoo Kim, Indiana University School of Journalism • This study examines the effects of factors related to individual politicians and their electoral constituency on political adoption and use of twitter in the context of Korean politics. The results show that, among politician’s characteristics, prominence of politician is significantly associated with political adoption and use of twitter but constituency-related variables do not account for political adoption and use of twitter significantly.
Thinking About in Political Comedy: Comparing the Role of Ability on Cognition and Political Attitudes between Late-Night Comedy and Cable News Audiences • Heather LaMarre, University of Minnesota • Using the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) as the theoretical framework, this study examines differential cognitive responses to political entertainment and political news under varying ability to attend to the political messages.
Examining news coverage of HPV vaccine policies: Can outrageous claims shift journalists’ focus? • Kelly Madden, University of Maryland • HPV vaccination mandates became a controversial issue in the Republican presidential primary of 2011 when Congresswoman Michele Bachmann made a claim linking HPV vaccines with mental retardation. The medical community lashed out, asserting evidence supported no such link. Bachmann’s comments and the medical community’s response ultimately altered news coverage of HPV vaccination mandates. This paper employs the Health Belief Model to evaluate the inclusion of health information related to vaccination and also analyzes journalists’ dependence on medical professionals as sources.
Bibliometric Analysis of Communication and Terrorism Scholarship • Michael McCluskey, Ohio State University; Elizabeth Stoycheff • Bibliometric measures were used to evaluate 20 years of communication and terrorism scholarship, revealing the most-cited articles, most co-cited articles and journal impact factors. Analysis focused on two co-citation dimensions, strength of ties between two articles and centrality of the articles in a network, plus how articles were co-cited. Implications and suggestions for the future are discussed.
Belief of Policy? Religious Cues and Voter Evaluations • Bryan McLaughlin, University of Wisconsin, Madison; David Wise, University of Wisconsin-Madison • Scholars contend that correctly applying religious cues is crucial to winning political elections. By conducting experiments on two national samples, we examine whether religious cues gain the support of religious voters when they are not tied to specific policy positions. Our findings provide strong evidence that explicit religious cues turn off those who are not religious, but minimal evidence that religious cues secure votes from those who are religious.
Perceptions of Influence On and Of Political Bloggers: A Survey of Top Political Bloggers • Laura Meadows, UNC at Chapel Hill • This study attempted to elucidate the factors that influence political bloggers’ decisions to choose particular blog topics and to analyze their perceptions of the influence of their own work on a variety of outcomes, groups, and issues.
A Rhetorical Analysis of Newsmagazine Coverage of The Republican Party as a Social Movement • Kevin Musgrave, University of Oklahoma; Bryan Carr, University of Oklahoma • This paper performs a rhetorical analysis to examine the ways in which the relation between the news media and politicians affect the way that the Republican Party, after the 2008 election of Barack Obama, has been covered in two mainstream news magazines (Time and Newsweek). Utilizing literature from Thomas Patterson and Todd Gitlin, these authors argue that the Republican Party’s leadership vacuum is being filled by leaders chosen by the media, based upon “newsworthiness”.
Does Twitter Motivate Political Engagement?: Tweeter, Opinion Leadership, and Political Discussion • Chang Sup Park • To examine the pattern of how opinion leadership influences political engagement among Twitter users, a web-based survey was conducted. Traditional opinion leadership successfully predicted public-affairs related motivations including information seeking, influencing others, and public expression. Nonetheless, the impact of opinion leadership on Twitter was mediated by these aforementioned motivations. Among three motivations, only public expression was significantly related to political discussion behavior. No significant relationship was found between Twitter use and political discussion.
The Radio President: Herbert Hoover on the Great Depression • Youn-Joo Park, University of Missouri • The mass media influence how a president is evaluated during the administration and remembered in history. A U.S. president who suffered from an image problem is Herbert Hoover whose term is negatively linked to the Great Depression. This historical study explores how he used radio to speak to people about the nation’s economic problems. An analysis of Hoover’s radio speeches provides insight on his presidential rhetoric and suggests applications for media relations in modern presidencies.
The Use (and Misuse) of Reframed News-Mediated Content in 2008 Presidential Campaign Ads • Chris Roberts, University of Alabama • Exploratory content analyses of ads from the 2008 presidential campaign, and a selection of available newspaper and wire service articles mentioned in those ads, show that campaigns were more likely to cite news stories than opinion pieces inside ads. Campaigns used news-mediated content more often to attack opponents than to acclaim themselves. The analysis identified six general ways that campaigns reframed news-mediated texts that differed from the original meaning created by newspapers and wire services, potentially misleading ad viewers.
“Three Versions of Jimmy Carter”: Paul Szep and the Production of Presidential Political Cartoons • Amber Roessner, University of Tennessee; Denae Darcy, University of Tennessee • On February 22, 1976, just two days before the New Hampshire primary, dark horse Democratic presidential candidate Jimmy Carter and his Peanut Brigade were fanning out to suburban homes, office complexes, and factories in an attempt to maintain their momentum after upsetting early presidential favorite Birch Bayh in Iowa. On the very same day, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Paul Szep offered Boston Globe readers his first statement on Carter.
Effects of Opinionated Media and Selective Exposure on Economic Perceptions during Two Presidential Elections • Rosanne Scholl, Louisiana State University; Ashley Kirzinger, Manship School, LSU • Citizens’ perceptions of the health of the economy loom large in Presidential elections. Where do these perceptions originate? Critics have worried that partisan and ideological news media polarize the public, and that political flacks want to manipulate perceptions in favor of their candidates. This study uses content analysis and secondary survey data to examine whether opinionated media and reinforcing selective exposure affect voters’ economic perceptions.
The Free Binayak Sen Campaign: Framing to Mobilize Collective Action for Social Change • Siobhan Smith, University of Louisville; Margaret D’Silva, University of Louisville; Nicole Meyer; Greg Leichty, University of Louisville • In 2007, Dr. Binayak Sen, an Indian pediatrician, was arrested and charged with sedition by the Chhattisgarh Government in relation to his prison visits of a jailed Maoist leader. Sen’s case was extensively covered by the Indian media and sparked a grassroots social movement aptly named the Free Binayak Sen Campaign. This research explored how the messages of a successful social movement were represented and framed in two national Indian newspapers, The Hindu and The Times of India.
New Media Influences on Political and Media Disaffection • Younei Soe • This research assesses the impact of new media on two civic dispositions: disaffection toward politics and disaffection toward media. As a primary method, thirty-one focus groups were conducted with young adults between 18 and 34 at two Midwestern and two East Coast universities. This study found that new media use has both positive (e.g., enhancing healthy skepticism) and negative (e.g., deepening political disaffection and causing confusion and anxiety) influences on civic-oriented outcomes.
Talking or Thinking? Pathways from News to Political Learning among Children • Edson Tandoc, University of Missouri-Columbia; Esther Thorson, University of Missouri-Columbia • Using a three-wave panel data, we tested the cognitive mediation model to explain political learning among children. Panel studies allow a stronger argument for causality. We found that news media use does not exert consistent direct effects on political knowledge. However, news media use predicts news elaboration and news discussion (Time 1) which both lead to subsequent political learning (measured at Time 2 and Time 3). News elaboration also predicts news discussion among children.
I’m Done! Causes of Selective Exposure: Interaction Effects of Incivility and Partisan Incongruence on Dissonance • Stephanie Jean Tsang • This study examines selective exposure by manipulating the tone (civil vs. uncivil) and partisan target (Democrats vs. Republicans) of a blogger’s critique on a news story in an experiment. Incivility is found to amplify the effect of partisanship incongruence on belief-driven dissonance and negative emotion. The emotion aroused in turn mediates the relationship between dissonance and selective exposure, while issue relevance plays a moderating role in the latter relationship.
Ratcheting up the grassroots rhetoric: Tea Party candidates and Twitter in the 2010 midterm elections • Jason Turcotte; Chance York • During the 2010 midterm elections 15 Tea Party candidates sought U.S. Senate seats; 95 sought bids to the U.S. House of Representatives; and 8 ran in gubernatorial campaigns. The movement produced a slew of victories in GOP primaries – including Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Kentucky, Maryland and Nevada – in addition to key general election victories. Furthermore, Bachmann and Cain’s 2012 presidential campaigns and the derailment of debt ceiling negotiations suggest Tea Party momentum continues to grow.
Explicating the Values-Issues Consistency Hypothesis through Need for Orientation • Sebastian Valenzuela, Pontifical Catholic University of Chile; Gennadiy Chernov, University of Regina, School of Journalism • Previous research has found that values moderate agenda-setting effects, so that when the topics in the media resonate with people’s values, the power of the media to set the agenda is stronger. However, we know little about the process by which values affect issue salience. Using an experiment, this study found that need for orientation-—the key psychological variable in agenda setting-—is a mediator of the values-issue salience relationship.
Which Candidates Can Be Mavericks? The Intersection of Issue Disagreement and Candidate Biography • Emily Vraga, George Washington University • In recent elections, candidates have often presented themselves as mavericks, willing to speak hard truths to the American people and counter their party on issues. An experimental study tests whether this approach is equally viable for all candidates. Manipulating the amount of issue disagreement for a feminine vs. masculine candidate demonstrates that a feminine candidate is consistently penalized more harshly for disagreeing with her party. Implications for campaign strategies and political decision-making are discussed.
The Civic Engagement and Psychological Empowerment of Micro-blog Usage in China: A Case Study of Sina Weibo • Keyi Xu, School of Journalism and Communication, The Chinese University of HK; Yang Liu, School of Journalism and Communication, The Chinese University of HK • This research focuses on civic engagement and psychological empowerment of Micro-blog in China from the approach of uses and gratifications theory. Sina Weibo, the most popular micro-blog service is taken as a case. Weibo usage is considered from two dimensions, usage pattern and motivation. Usage pattern refers to frequency, and five motivations including interaction, entertainment, expressing, political reading, and passing-time were investigated.
Talking as communicators: Effects of group communication, government-citizen interaction, and perceived media importance on online political discussion • Na Liu, City University of Hong Kong; Xinzhi Zhang, City University of Hong Kong • This study makes two contributions to the research aiming at predicting online political discussion. First, it provides support for a theoretical model that better accounts for the relationship among online political discussion, perceived importance of new media, group communication, and government-citizen online interaction.
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