Selective exposure, source cues, and framing effects: How partisan news impacts the American citizen.

摘要

This project asks two primary questions. One has to do with the conditions in which an individual is more likely or less likely to engage in political selective exposure to news. I find that selective exposure has become increasingly common over the past 14 years, and that over time, ideology is a more consistent predictor of selective exposure than is partisanship. I also find that individuals do prefer to get information from sources that one perceives to be ideologically compatible.;The second primary question of my dissertation asks whether the source of a piece of news affects the degree to which an individual accepts the news as being accurate. Recently, scholars have looked at whether explicitly partisan cues can act as a framing mechanism, but no one has studied whether or not this is true of news sources as well. I test this question using an experimental design that utilized Amazon's Mturk worker program for data collection.;I find that it is very difficult to frame audiences toward acceptance of a story on a salient issue, such as same-sex marriage, but it is common to change one's mind on a more technical issue like free trade. Outside of persuasion, I find that individuals randomly exposed to stories about same-sex marriage are influenced by the story and will also update views of the news organization that presents the story. Two important findings standout out as related to the survey experiment: First, it is much easier to successfully frame a technical issue than it is to frame a salient issue. Second, the source of the frame matters for how one perceives news. This project ends with the argument that scholars must begin to understand the importance of the source of information while we also study the content of a message.