Although claims of media bias are abundant, systematic and scientific investigations of potential biases are rare. The present study was an attempt to determine whether a perception of bias would be found in the headlines of lead or major stories taken from the Web sites of two major American news organizations, CNN and FOX News, during the final two months of the 2004 presidential campaign. Significant perceptions of bias were found. Overall, headlines taken from CNN were rated as significantly more liberal than those taken from FOX News. Headlines taken from FOX News were rated as slightly on the liberal side of neutral. With CNN's headlines slightly to the left of FOX News', instructing participants that the headlines came from a particular source did not influence the results. Although the study by no means provides the definitive answer to whether major news organizations have biases, it indicates that perceptions of bias exist.
The present study examined the recall of material representative and non representative of schemata for social and evaluative situations. Socially anxious (n = 24) and nonanxious (n = 25) individuals were presented with three positively valenced and three negatively valenced prose passages describing common social and evaluative scenarios. Eight of the sentences in each passage described events representative of the schema content of most individuals, whereas three of the sentences in each passage described events that are not representative of typical schema content. Participants completed a free recall task in both immediate (i.e. 2 minutes) and delayed (i.e. one week) recall conditions. Although there were no group differences as a function of type of content (i.e. schematic, non-schematic), socially anxious individuals were less likely than nonanxious individuals to accurately recall the gist of passages containing negative information in the immediate recall condition. In all, this study provided little evidence for the influence of maladaptive schema content on memory for threatening material in anxious individuals, but it added to an increasingly large literature suggesting that some types of anxiety are associated with an avoidance of processing emotional material.
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